I WENT BACK TO COLLEGE LAST WEEK. BIG MISTAKE

I went back to college last week. Big mistake.

When I left home to matriculate in the 1970s, after a quietly rebellious and singularly undistinguished high school career, I was ready for the experience. This time I wasn't so lucky.

My oldest son is scouting for a university to attend, which counts as enough of a generational shock. Accompanying him last week to appraise one school, I grimly faced past and present, believing somehow they were not so far apart but ultimately recognizing that as wishful thinking.

When I left college, Jimmy Carter was president, John Travolta was a mega-star and there was still the possibility of a Beatles reunion. My son, then a toddler, cared mainly for existing in a whirling dervish manner that exacted a huge amount of chasing by his parents.

In more recent times, postal carriers accept the fact he is the only occupant of our household to get non-bill-related mail. Each day, he collects from the mailbox a stream of catalogs, brochures, invitations, newsletters and other correspondence from colleges near and far, big and small. This is part of the courtship ritual between higher education institutions and students who, having scored well on standardized tests, are rewarded by placement on a well-circulated mailing list.

(The joke around our house is that he hasn't really arrived in the big time until he gets an inquiry from the IQ Zoo, which is, after a fashion, a music conservatory for animals located in Hot Springs, Ark. They actually taught a chicken to play the piano.)

Piling his potential and the family's good intentions into a car, the Newtons set out for a half-dozen hours of driving and a lesser length of time hearing various bravura sales pitches for this institution's offerings.

Though I didn't attend this school, little there (that is, in college generally) was as I remembered it. There were books and classrooms and a stately library (and 19-year-old coeds, which did little to ease my pangs of aging), but I found little in that place to identify with ... though the culture it came from I recognized.

There was the student body president giving a presentation at a general orientation session, a well-spoken, well-dressed confident young man who, seeking applause for a visiting student he called to the stage to assist him, implored the auditorium (ala Arsenio) to "give it up." Caught for a moment in a cultural vacuum, the audience didn't know right away whether to clap or pump their fists and woof.

Student volunteers also conducted the campus tours, hiking attentive parents and antsy teens from building to building and quizzing the prospective students about their interests.

Unlike many of the other tour guides I saw, dressed college-sloppy for their assignment, the earnest woman who led our group turned out in her dressed-for-success outfit (blazer, skirt and hose), conceding only to some low-heel pumps necessitated by her desire to walk backwards and constantly address her guests during most of the tour.

A senior psychology major, she had taken some time to learn about the campus and was careful not to offend. ("I never joined a sorority, but I don't have anything against going Greek," she informed us.)

The tour guide at one dormitory (residential college, to lift their phrase) was more casual in dress and demeanor, wearing baggy shorts, a New York University School of Medicine sweatshirt and a thin golden loop through his earlobe. "You here for a tour?" he asked, approaching. "Cool." And we were off.

The dorm was like dozens of others I've seen, though the rooms seemed much smaller. (Could it be that I had grown bigger?) We looked in several and all were adorned with the funky style of renters just sent out on their own.

Different, however, were the trappings of the rooms, which were significantly more high-tech than the all-purpose popcorn popper I took to my freshman dorm room. (I was not alone in this regard: A woman in my first-year speech class gave as her "speech to inform" a five-minute presentation to spellbound peers on how full-course meals could be prepared in a bucket-shaped popcorn popper.)

Many of these dorm rooms had microwave ovens, not to mention personal computers that could access the university mainframe. All had compact disc players, a considerable step up from the plastic albums commonplace in my dormitory. The best-sounding equipment on my dorm floor was a quad unit that rattled walls every afternoon at 6:30 with an album by the band Bad Company. Pearl Jam seemed to be the music of choice in the rooms I saw last week.

Perhaps this is a tiresome theme, but the journey from young to old is painfully brief. How I went from college student to college student financier in such a hurry confounds me. As a transition period from childhood to real life, college does the job well enough. The ensuing years get tricky.

Maybe my trip back to campus wasn't so unlucky. I complained about the rigors of final exams in college, and I laugh now at the ease of that work relative to my current endeavors. Perhaps that should clue me in to the complaints I have now and how I will look back on them 20 years hence.