NONFICTION: PARENT TRAP
CRAZY U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College by Andrew Ferguson
My daughter’s college applications are all in, and now we can quietly go nuts while admissions fairies from coast to coast get 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 outsized 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 under-represented 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.”
