College Crazy

The Reluctant Education of a Baaaaad Dad

Andrew Ferguson (View Bio)
Simon & Schuster, 2011

This book is about the endless frustrations and anxieties that surround our collective pathology over college admissions. Because of its mystery, the admissions process has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of freelance counselors, admissions officers, test preparers, essay coaches, journalistic specialists, interview advisers, scholars, therapists, tutors, reformers, quickie-book writers, political activists, along with professional kibitzers, second-guessers, and hucksters of every stripe. Scores of how-to books are published each year to guide parents and kids through the admissions maze; indeed the how-to glut is another symptom of a country gone college crazy. This book is not one of those, although the lessons learned in the course of writing it might serve as a guide, or at least a comfort, for the perplexed.

Instead, COLLEGE CRAZY is part journalism, part personal testimony, and part—unavoidably and unapologetically—rant. As a reporter, Andy Ferguson has been investigating the quirks of the industry and the characters who have made it what it is. As a bewildered father, he has been recording how my son and I have found ourselves in the midst of the madness and how we’ve managed to muddle through. The stages of our progress form the spine of the book. Intertwined with the personal accounts are the larger stories that universalize our individual experience: character studies of industry figures, a pocket history of higher education in America, a survey of the academic literature on what a college education means socially and professionally, along with a little investigative digging about the big businesses that fatten on the epidemic of parental confusion and worry.