<p>Sometimes the parent has to make the choice when it comes to finances and other family members and issues need to take precedence when it comes time to make that decision. </p>
<p>Also, I don't really mind the "we". I often use that when I am the "tag along " party doing little, even nothing in the situation. Sometimes, parents need to get the shell of the process started, guiding kids along and informing them of things that they may not discover themselves or at a price that no one wants to pay. I know I did all of my own college stuff, and made many mistakes that even a skim reading of CC would have addressed. I was really pretty up there in taking care of things like that, and would have so appreciated a knowledgeable parent to be a guide. Now though there are many more resources available, kids often can still make costly and foolish mistakes that are easily noticed by an aware adult, and I don't see any problem in the parent taking a role in the process. Especially if the kid is ambivalent and has no idea where and how to start. After all, the undergraduate education is considered the parents' responsibility and choice in this country, to the point where they are held responsible for the costs whether the kids want that situation or not.</p>
<p>As a parenting issue, I agree fully, that there is a letting go process that should be occurring at that point. Especially if the kid is going away to college. Not fair to plop him in a place hours away, when his life has been micromanaged up to this point. Not good parenting. But I personally have always looked at the college process as the separation milestone where it is pretty much the last time, I want to get involved in their lives to this extent. Hopefully by the end of the process, the kids have learned some skills of decision making and values and family finances. The next apps are going to be on them entirely with help only as requested. But right now my son is having trouble filling out his guidance counselors preliminary college questionairre, and if he answers them with his "dunnos" , I know full well he will get a short shrift from the GCs, as opposed to some well thought out answers many kids (yeah, I'm in College Central Country) will have. I will try to draw him out and make him think, and get something more about him. He will be dragged and pushed into the process, if he is like his brothers, but hopefully at the end of it, he will have learned enough to be able to do it himself, and he has put enough input that the choices will suit him. No way would I push him into a college he does not want, but some kids have no idea what they want, and need a lot of help in getting together suitable lists. And I have seen these kids graduate happily from their schools that their parents were heavily involved in choosing, and do well as mature adults thereafter, as a rule not exception. I don't mean kids hog tied and thrown into a school against their wills and interests, however, but kids who were just clueless, uninterested, and unskilled in the decision making processes.</p>