'Crazy U': A college search education

My daughter's college applications are all in, and now we quietly go nuts while admissions fairies from coast to coast are busy, as Andrew Ferguson wonderfully puts it, "sprinkling pixie dust and waving wands, dashing dreams or making them come true."

It's an apt metaphor because, as anyone who's been in it knows, the family caravan to collegeland is magical and terrifying: You begin wide-eyed and innocent, skipping along with outsize hopes, only to shrink before the fire-breathing ogres of the SAT, the essay, the deadlines, the costs. In "Crazy U," Ferguson invites you to join him on the dream-mare that he and his son endured.

The book is both a hilarious narrative and an incisive guide to the college admissions process. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, has done his research, poring over mountains of published material and interviewing admissions officers, college coaches, academics and the guy behind the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.

It may seem strange to say that a book so full of heartache is a pleasure to read, but Ferguson's storytelling is irresistible. You root for the obsessive, well-meaning dad and his lackadaisical son, and you laugh out loud over their college-app tug of war. There's the son telling his high school counselor that in college he wants to major in beer and paint his chest in the school colors at football games, prompting Dad to snap later: "It'll be a big help when he writes your recommendation."

Then there's Dad handing his procrastinator a book on successful college essays and watching the boy vacantly turn it over in his hands. "I thought of the apes coming upon the obelisk in the opening scene of '2001: A Space Odyssey,' " Dad writes. "He did everything but sniff it."

Finally, the Ferguson applications are on their way to a range of schools -- tough ones such as Georgetown and Notre Dame, as well as the safety school, Indiana University. Now his tale catches up with my own family drama, and that of all this year's applicants: the seemingly everlasting wait. Adding to the father's tension, the son sets up a college interview with a local alumnus, prompting Dad to say, "I don't mean to nag," and then nag his son to shave before the meeting, and not to use the word "like" too much, and "please, please, don't wear your baseball cap to the interview."

Waiting for word also brings an incessant weighing of the odds. Ferguson calculates the impact of the "hooked" slots -- those going to students who have an advantage because of athletic prowess, status as an underrepresented minority, or parents who have lots of money or attended the university. After all those places are scooped up, Ferguson reckons, the chances of getting into a dream school are "much worse than a crapshoot."

But the dice do come up for his son. He gets into one of his preferred colleges, a place Ferguson will identify only as BSU, Big State University. Ferguson takes us up to move-in day at BSU, noting how bewildered his son looked as the family was leaving. Dad himself was nearly grief-stricken.

"Some part of them is gone for good," he reflects. "It's been turned away from home and toward a place we don't really see, that a parent can't reach, is not supposed to reach."

His sadness then flamed into an insane anger "at all the things a man can't control." Leaving the campus, he stopped at a gas station, filled the tank and gunned the engine until he "felt a sickening tug and heard the sound of sheet metal being ripped from the welded bolts, because I'd left the nozzle in the tank."

CRAZY U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, by Andrew Ferguson. Simon & Schuster, 228 pp, $25.

EXCERPT FROM "CRAZY U"

College admissions in America is a big sprawling subject, but this is not, you'll notice, a big sprawling book. It's one parent's view, the process seen from beginning to end through the prism of a father's own flesh and blood. (Watch your step - there are lots of metaphors running loose around here.) Like many big subjects, college admissions plays itself out on a small scale. The great issues it raises, the clashing interests and massive institutions it involves, come to earth in the lives of ordinary people, clustered more often than not in families. That's how it happened to us.

It began with a trickle, which is why I didn't notice anything at first. "Who's going to Elon College?" I asked innocently enough, fingering the brochure that arrived in the mail one day. There was no answer, since no one in the house had ever heard of Elon College, much less expressed an interest in it.

"Occidental College?" I called out the next day, when the mail arrived with another brochure - or viewbook, as I learned to call them in the admissions world. "Who in his right mind would go to an overpriced money trap like Occidental College?"

It was a sardonic question, as I'll explain in a moment, and it too was met with silence. On the third day there were two fat envelopes and another viewbook, also from schools I hadn't heard of, and then four the next day, and the next. Within a month, more than a hundred envelopes and viewbooks had been stuffed in the mailbox, glowing with color photos of cheerful undergraduates lounging on sunlit knolls against backdrops of shade trees and redbrick towers. The viewbooks were printed on paper so thick and voluptuous they might have been mistaken for the leaves of a rubber plant - you didn't know whether to read them or slurp them like a giraffe. And each was addressed to my 16-going-on-17-year-old son, whose name had somehow found its way onto a mailing list of high school juniors.

My boy was being solicited, as surely and shamelessly as a sailor come to port.

This was something new, something unexpected. I came to see over the next many months that what had once been a fairly brief and straightforward process, in which the children of the middle and upper classes found a suitable college, filled out an application, got in, and then went happily away, returning home only now and then to celebrate holidays and borrow money, has evolved into a multiyear rite of passage, often beginning before puberty.

For some of us, anyway. It's worth remembering at the outset that most American high schoolers go on to college, roughly 70 percent of them, and 80 percent of those attend schools that don't involve the difficulties encountered in these pages. Most college kids go to what admissions people call "nonselective" schools, and many of them begin at two-year institutions; it's not too much to say that there's a seat in American higher education for anyone who wants one. Even the cost won't be prohibitive for the majority of students. More than 50 percent of us spend less than $10,000 a year on college, and a good chunk of this can usually be covered by loans and grants. For lots of high school graduates the pressing issue of higher education is finding the time off from work to take advantage of it.

All Americans, by virtue of being Americans, are winners of life's lotto, in my opinion, as citizens of the most prosperous and least class-bound country in history. But the people spoken of in this book, my family included, are luckier than most. I had a happy childhood. My own children are healthy and don't hate me, or say they don't, and chief among my wife's numberless virtues are tolerance, patience, and good humor. We live in a reasonably safe neighborhood in one of those "close-in" suburbs that have suddenly become desirable. I have a job, as many Americans do not at the moment, and while we're far from well-to-do, the money we bring home puts us, in my layman's reckoning, in the bottom quintile of the lower upper middle class. As a consequence we can entertain a wide choice of futures for our children.

I have no right to complain, in other words. My gripes and whines, my missteps and misfortunes in trying to get my son into a highly selective college are the complaints of a man whom fate has treated kindly. I hope that readers, forgiving as always, will keep this in mind as they go along. In "Ahead of the Curve," his wonderful book about his years at Harvard Business School, Philip Delves Broughton faced the same problem. How do you chronicle personal misadventures that are themselves, in the large scheme of things, the result of unbelievable luck? Only the luckiest people get to be unlucky in this way. Imagine George Clooney bursting into tears because his lingerie-model girlfriend broke the kitchen faucet in his thirty-room chalet on Lake Como: you will be excused for thinking the lucky bastard really ought to dry up and get over it. As Broughton said about his own difficulties at Harvard, these are high-class problems. So are mine, and I'm grateful for them.

From "Crazy U" by Andrew Ferguson. Copyright © 2011 by Andrew Ferguson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.