By Heidi Landecker

Text messages from a high-school senior applying to colleges, to his mother:

November 20, 11:33 a.m.: Clemson is December 1. Is this how you spell vacillate?

November 25, 11:11 a.m.: something went wrong with that wash u thing. I did not get any confirmation we should redo tonight

January 13, 10:45 a.m.: You clearly do not know how to use T9 word because that message came out as blabber, yes SATs need to be sent. Did you do it?

March 13, 3:20 p.m.: Wash U st. Lou, Baaaby!

Those arrived in the winter, when my younger son was applying to 10 colleges. Son of a professor at a Large Public University and a Chronicle editor, our second child complained that he was far worse off than his friends: His parents were obsessed with colleges.

At least, we were obsessed with colleges other than Large Public U. Early on we swore to send our two boys anywhere but.

Don't get me wrong; Large Public is a research university with a solid program in architecture, my son's intended major. It counts three Nobel Prize winners on its faculty; it has a beautiful suburban campus. My husband has taught there for 30 years, and our children can attend tuition-free.

But Large Public is on University Boulevard, the same street as my kids' high school. Our boys have been cheering at its basketball games since they were 13 and 11. When they were 10 and 8, their coolest treat was to go to the campus with their dad to play arcade games in the student union. When Child No. 2 was 7, he went with me to the architecture school, and I remember him gazing at the models in the studio, fascinated.

You know how this is going to end.

Yet to us, college was about going away, learning to navigate a new social order, growing up. My husband, a lower-middle-class Englishman from a small city, went to the London School of Economics and Penn. I grew up on a farm and turned down Cornell (too close to home) to attend Antioch College, whose co-op program sent me to California and Maine. College, to us, was not Large Public University that by age 17 you know like the back of your hand.

Besides, for undergraduates, Large Public U. is not very intellectual.

But when our first child chose Large Public's business school two years ago, the choice seemed right. This was the son who, when I asked how he felt about a less-than-stellar report card in ninth grade, said, "It's good enough to get me into [Large Public U.] and still have time to play with my friends." This is the son who, when a Macalester College tour guide remarked that "if you don't want a college where the professor knows your name and knows if you miss class, you shouldn't be here," turned to me and whispered, "Why are we here, anyway?"

Wanting to show them that colleges come in all stripes, we'd taken our boys to lots of campuses: Colgate ("fewer kids than my high school"); Cornell ("middle of nowhere"); Carleton (refused to get out of the car); the Rhode Island School of Design, for Child 2, an art student ("too many art students"); Penn ("too nerdy").

Eventually we stopped visiting colleges, and Child 2's list included five he had never seen.

Applying to 10 colleges makes for plenty to keep track of, but in this era of Peak High School Graduates, it was normal for motivated students at Large Public High School. Applications cost money, but we didn't mind; it proved that Child 2 valued leaving home.

His essay, written without a shred of help from his editor parent, began "I never did right good," criticized the SAT as discriminatory because "if two parts out of three emphasized math instead of two parts emphasizing writing, I would fry them," and described how, unable to summon more than a B in English, he had learned to express himself through art.

So his seven acceptances ("Wash U st Lou, Baaaby!") made him feel pretty good.

We felt even better: Three of the colleges offered scholarships, unbidden. We'd been saving for college for two decades and had a fund in each child's name that, before the recession, would have paid for anywhere. Now the funds cover about three years each. And because three of Child 2's acceptance letters came from better colleges, Large Public seemed out of the running.

Washington University in St. Louis wanted to fly him out for a visit. He went, while I got the student-aid office on the phone. Wash U. had offered no scholarship, but surely bringing him to St. Louis on its dime meant it wanted him.

It didn't, unless he could pay.

We heard about another student who had returned from Wash U. excited. "It's like Hogwarts!" she told her parents. If Child 2 had shown an inkling of that enthusiasm, we would have found a way.

But he said only, "It was fine. If it was the same price as [Large Public University], I would go."

That's when we knew where he would go to college. Yet through two more visits, we held out hope.

My husband loved Carnegie Mellon; during its architecture-information session, Child 2 fell asleep.

At Georgia Tech, I focused on things important to 17-year-old boys: empty beer cups on frat-house lawns (not nerdy); view of Georgia Dome from indoor running track; cute women in first-year studio (about 50 percent of the class).

Child 2 liked Georgia Tech, as did we: Compared with Carnegie Mellon ($250,000), four years cost $130,000. And then Child No. 2 read the Fiske Guide to Colleges' Georgia Tech entry: "If you are looking for lazy days on the campus green and hard-partying weekends, look elsewhere. … 'Tech is tough.'"—and chose Large Public University instead.

Some of you are doubtless thinking: Chronicle editors shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Others are thinking: If your kid had been smart enough to get into Yale, I wouldn't be reading this essay.

True, although neither boy, who because of legacy might have had a glimmer of a chance at our Ivy graduate schools, would apply to an elite college. Products of Large Public High, 40 percent white and 60 percent Hispanic and African-American, they found Penn "too white"; Cornell, where I ended up, "too rich."

Long ago I took Child No. 1 to visit the kindergarten he would go to that fall. A sign over a door read, "These are the languages we speak at [Large Public Elementary School]." There were 22, some of which I had to look up in a dictionary. "That," I thought, "is a school." Large Public U. is similarly diverse. Child 1 is having the time of his life there; chances are our second child will, too.

He will also be away from home. We receive the occasional text message from Child 1 asking for quarters—he needs them to wash clothes at Large Public, which evidently has no banks—but we see him on the holidays. He could be 1,000 miles away.

What about Large Public's intellectual failings? That's easy: We produced no intellectuals. Why pay $200,000 for frat life at Wash U., especially when the frat life on University Boulevard is better?

I thought that choosing a college had changed a lot since we did so, 40 years ago, but I realize that what is different isn't so much the process as the world we gave our children to embark from. Growing up yearning for experiences beyond our reach, we wanted cities, cultural choices, and travel.

Then we gave our children that. So they don't need to leave home to go away.

Still, there's always graduate school.

Heidi Landecker is an assistant managing editor at The Chronicle.