Joe (and Chelsea) College

The arrival of Chelsea Clinton at Stanford University last week was a closely-covered media event, garnering front-page photos and stories nationwide. Chelsea's departure has greatly interested the American public. But aside from the logistics of the Secret Service and more pertinent to the rest of us, Chelsea's departure from the White House (read: home) has focused national attention on the American college system's impact on the nuclear family and the change college imposes on the relationship between parents and their children.

Naturally, the arrival of the President's daughter at college was a more newsworthy event than yours was, unless you were accompained by an entourage of 200 people, but the core of her experience has been and will be the same as that of thousands of other college freshmen. Chelsea spent the last few weeks vacationing before packing up the part of her life that would fit into brown boxes. The fact that she flew to California in Air Force One simply makes her arrival unusual, but like many of the other 1,649 first-years who arrived at Stanford this week, dinner with mom and/or dad will be a special occasion instead of an evening ritual.

A Swedish friend remarked to me that she found American college students to be more emotionally dependent on their parents than their European counterparts. However, going off to college is akin to a rite of passage in American culture, marking the beginning of a transformation from a dependent child to an independent one and rapidly thereafter to an adult.

Whereas in many other countries and cultures, the nuclear family survives a university education and often well beyond one, whether under one physical roof or simply in the same city, in America, the dynamics of the parent-child relationship changes forever once high school is over. In France, for example, it is very common for students to attend university in their home city and live with their parents, or to spend another year at home preparing their Baccalaureate. Similarly in Israel, 18-year-olds who enter the army often split their time between the base and home, and then live with their parents during their university years. But in America, students go directly from living under the rules and security of their parents to living with other people their age, often left only to shape their own curricula, both social and academic. How can the parent-student/adult-to-be relationship remain the same after the initial semester?

The President was fatalistic about his only child's departure: "There's nothing I can do about it now. That's what you raise them for. I'm happy and sad at the same time." Clinton's words resonate with many parents who are at once excited by their children's imminent maturation and dismayed by the grief their children's vacancy will cause them. The loss or at least the nostalgia felt by parents is inevitable, for when an American child goes to college, she begins the rest of her independent life.

Despite her celebrity, Chelsea will experience a development similar to that of her peers. She will never really be a part of her parents' home again, she will get used to living away from her mother and father and she will realize that what lies ahead of her is a life that she will have to define on her own.

While America is not the only country that sends its children away to school, the American college experience is unique. Each of the four years may be seen as a distinct developmental stage: the first year is an exploratory and overwhelming one, one in which previous flirtations with independence become realities; sophomore year is a trying one in which one's true self struggles to emerge, and legitimate interests are supposed to materialize; by junior year, college as such has lost its novelty and has simply and welcomely become life; and by senior year, as a friend told me, the question, what did you do this summer? quickly becomes, what are your plans for next year? and by implication for the rest of your life.

This four-year trajectory, as it were, occupies the pages of American press every fall, because college in America creates adulthood. Chelsea Clinton has occupied the national spotlight for a brief moment, not because she is the daughter of the President, but because she is a daughter about to become a young woman; parents, students and future parents can relate to what the First Family is going through because the college experience is an integral part of growing up in America. Her celebrity has brought college once again to front pages across the country, but her status as a Clinton means little beyond that. Like many other American 18-year olds, Chelsea is about to find out who she is, by herself; and like them, she, her parents and their relationship to each other will be absorbed by and changed by her development.