Mom, What Was Applying to College Like in the 90's?

There’s a trend on the socials right now called:

“Mom, what were you like in the 90s?”

Funny enough, this photo was already on the docket to be my next Substack post. I just didn’t have the words yet.

Now I do.

I think the answer is…

We were just… living.

And apparently being cutting edge by hiring a professional photographer to take this epic official photo of a group of friends headed off into the world from Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

I remember it was kind of a scramble to get the sweatshirts for this. We probably had to call and order them over a wall phone.

Prime shipping there was not.

Looking at it now, it feels like the analog version of what I see all the Class of ’26 girls posting today on their stories:

“Congrats Katie on Michigan!!! So proud of you!!! ILYSM! Going to miss youuuuuuu!”

Well now we are the parents.

And we have become those people.

The ones saying, It just wasn’t like this when we were applying.

It’s annoying to our kids and honestly a little annoying to ourselves.

But it’s also human to marvel at the difference. The world changed fast. And when something changes that fast, you can’t help but look back and compare.

To understand the pictured crew’s 1996–97 college decisions, though, you have to understand senior year itself.

So if our collective fifteen children asked us what we were like in the 90s?

Well…senior year looked a little like this:

Music alone should have disqualified us from ever complaining again.

Tupac’s All Eyez on Me was still everywhere.
The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death came out two weeks after he died and we were not okay.
Counting Crows released Recovering the Satellites and it lived permanently in the CD player of my 1995 Geo Prism.

The Spice Girls arrived and we all immediately assigned ourselves a Spice identity.

Dave Matthews Band was exploding and we were extremely smug about knowing them already.

We played:

“Bittersweet Symphony”
“Semi-Charmed Life”
“Return of the Mack”
“I’ll Be Missing You”

And yes.

“Hanson — Mmmbop.”

We will not apologize.

Senior year also smelled very specific.

Bath & Body Works Juniper Breeze.
CK One.
Gap Happy.
Maybe even a little Baby Soft in there.

Clinique Black Honey lipstick in our bags.

Our eyebrows were plucked to near extinction.

We wore light-wash jeans and pierced our ears for a third time.

We got “internship passes” so we could leave campus for lunch, which meant driving to Einstein’s in my Geo Prism with friends and feeling like an adult.

We got gummy worms from the help-yourself grocery store candy bins and weighed them before heading back to school, using our after-school job money.

Either way it felt like peak freedom.

We paged each other to alert on location.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, we picked colleges.

Not through spreadsheets or strategy sessions or even elaborate road trips.

The funny thing is none of us had a particularly sophisticated explanation for why we picked the schools we picked.

Some of us had visited. Some of us hadn’t.
Some of us had family ties.
Some of us knew this girl two years older who we really liked who said, “You’d like it here too.”
Some of us had been recruited as an athlete.

(Ahem. Not me.)

Katie, who did end up at Michigan, applied to nearly every Big Ten school but didn’t visit the one she ultimately chose until after she was accepted. Another school only entered the conversation because someone casually suggested she should “think bigger.”

But many of our decisions came down to something like this:

You walked around campus.
You ate lunch somewhere nearby.
You imagined yourself there.

If it felt right, that was enough.

My mom still jokes that I got to the parking lot at Georgia and said,

“Yep. I like it here.”

In fairness, it was a sunny day and I had just left the middle of winter in Minnesota.

I was like, check.

Yeah. I could see myself here.

And now we’re the parents with the bumper stickers. The license plate holders. The sweatshirts.

Soon I’ll be adding a few more to my car as I proudly send tuition to new places.

Because if I know anything about what applying to college was like in the 90s, it’s this:

It makes me even more proud of my kids for navigating a world full of noise, hype, and daily pressure. And yet sometimes the decision still comes down to a gut feeling… and a sunny day.