BOSTON

It’s amazing how little a career of reading and writing about higher education has equipped me to offer meaningful help on my 17-year-old son’s college search.

Recently, my family and I went visiting colleges, and my main observation was how, when you’re rushing to see as many campuses as possible, even my beloved New England can look like a jumble of impersonal highways laced with chain hotels and chain restaurants.

Another observation is how proud New England colleges are of their Division I athletic teams. Despite all the griping about high schools being out of sync with colleges, the sports fantasy is an area where they align well. My son’s school offers four “academic days” when students can be excused to go visit colleges.

One parent asked, “What if they play a sport? Will they be excused from practice that day?” The guidance director answered sheepishly: “Most of the coaches are okay with that, but it varies.” (An afternoon of sprints may be worth more to some students, especially if they’re scholarship material, than finding the perfect college match.)

We diverted from the New England tour with a ferry ride to Long Island from Bridgeport, Conn. The American Institute for Economic Research recently identified Bridgeport as America’s second best “small metro” in which to attend college — above such known powerhouses as Ann Arbor, Mich., Madison, Wis., Durham, N.C., and New Haven, Conn. Gritty Bridgeport is home to a university dogged by controversy after it was rescued from the financial brink in the early ’90s by an affiliate of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, but the honored small metro also includes ritzier Fairfield County towns, where high college degree attainment and high per-capita income pump up overall rankings.

At one university, a tour guide aimed at anxious parental hearts by gloating about the campus’s new escort service and security measures. During a quiet moment, I asked the guide if the security steps followed a wave of campus crime. “No,” she conceded, “I’m a petite woman and I’ve never had to use an escort during my time on campus.”

We also saw lots of dorms, not the fancy type hyped up by the media, but the stale kind I remember from college days . . . enhanced with wireless, of course.

Also every school wants to outdo the next with its commitment to the environment. The new public enemy No. 1 is the plastic lunch tray. The trays are nonrecyclable and thus destined to clog landfills. Trays also encourage overuse of water for dishwashing, and tempt students with more space for cafeteria junk food, destined to clog arteries. Some colleges boast about going trayless. But not bottomless: One vowed to keep the no-longer-used trays on hand for rear protection during winter sledding.

To be sure, competition for college has colored my view lately. On an afternoon train out of Boston, one woman signs off her cell phone call with a child, saying, “Okay, study your butt off.” Another says, “All right, now you just have your project to do.” You’d think we were racing to the moon again.

But the college search also reminded us of the advantages we enjoy. At the time, the Connecticut Better Business Bureau was warning that “consumers looking to get ahead are being taken-in by so-called diploma mills” . . . paying up to $1,400 to earn a diploma by taking an online test or through “life experience” only to learn that college admissions departments and employers didn’t fall for the credential. And my son is downright privileged, compared with the dozens of migrant workers we saw waiting for buses along the farmy end of Long Island. The question for him, as for so many others, will be less about access to college and more about success in college.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.