Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College by Andrew Ferguson
c.2011, Simon & Schuster
$25/$28.99 Canada
228 pages

On any normal day, your teenager couldn’t care less about the Postal Service. Oh, sure, there’s some interest around his birthday when the mail might hold a card with a “little extra” from Grandma, but e-mail and text are his main communications tools. Snail-mail is old school.

But then there’s that period in life when the mailbox is your teen’s favorite hangout, the postal carrier is his best friend and e-mails are forgotten in favor of thick catalogs and fat letters. In the new memoir, Crazy U by Andrew Ferguson, you’ll find out how one father helped his son push the envelope right into college.

When the glossy brochures and hefty viewbooks began arriving in the mail, Andrew Ferguson knew what was happening: his 16-almost-17-year-old son had landed on a national list of high school juniors. And it was time for Junior to start thinking about college.

But things were different than when Ferguson was in high school. What had been a “fairly brief and straightforward process” had become complicated, confusing and expensive. It was no longer possible to apply for school, get accepted, then leave for home without leaping through several hoops and over piles of paper.

Ferguson went on a mission to find out why.

Not long ago, he discovered, college leaders looked at the future with lumps in their throats: not everybody aspired to higher education and jobs were plentiful without a degree. Faced with possible declining enrollment in the 1970s, administrators used “every technique of modern marketing” to urge high-schoolers to matriculate. Today, about 60 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds attend college.

By sitting in on a high-priced seminar with a notable college admissions counselor, Ferguson learned that applications need a nuanced touch and the money you throw at fancy lessons may be wasted. From the man behind the U.S. News & World Report magazine, he discovered that college ranking numbers can be “massaged” and conflicting.

Ferguson took the SAT test with his son (who had a higher score). He slogged through an Olympian pile of catalogs and a maze of bank-baring financial forms. Together, father and son tackled essays and campus visits. Then, in a blink, all that was left to do was wait and hope that the longed-for college liked what they saw.

Looking at an emptier nest this fall? Then you’ll surely see your own household inside Crazy U. With a journalist’s eye for facts and a father’s eye for the absurd, author Andrew Ferguson shoves aside pomp and circumstance to explain why getting into college has become such an ordeal and how harried parents can survive the process.

While those explanations can get bogged down by minutiae now and then, Ferguson keeps his audience’s attention by liberally applying his sense of humor about the whole thing. That makes this book funny as well as useful.

If there’s a future Class of 2017 member in your house, read this book. You’ll both want to keep your sanity, and Crazy U does that to the letter.

Terri Schlichenmeyer has been reading since she was three years old and never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books. Readers with questions or comments may write to Terri in care of this publication.