College application craziness

Andrew Ferguson is now discovering the bizarre world of college applications as his son nears that age when parents look back on the person they thought was their totally admirable child and find out instead how bare that teenager's professional resume is.

A further symptom of college madness, as I should have known already, is the professionalization of childhood. As the number of applicants increases, competition for the most desirable schools becomes cutthroat, so the ambitious, forward-looking parent will design his child's teenage years to accumulate experiences that will gild a résumé--also called, with disarming candor, a "brag sheet"--and inspire the admiration of a college admissions committee. The nationwide mania for high school Advanced Placement courses is one consequence of childhood résumé-building; the alarming rise in "voluntarism rates" among high school students, particularly in their junior year, is another.

As I've now come to learn, more often than not the AP classes don't earn the advanced place in college that students expect. But this doesn't matter--just as no one seems to mind that volunteer work done purely for the sake of personal standing isn't voluntary by any common definition and certainly isn't evidence of the selflessness that voluntarism is supposed to denote. The bizarre illogic of these schemes is part of what it means to go college crazy. That goes double for the economics of the thing: Average tuition has vastly increased in the last generation, as any parent soon discovers, and the increase in tuition has increased demand for student aid to pay the tuition, which colleges then feel compelled to raise to pay for the increased student aid.

As for the remainder of the tuition--that portion not covered by student aid--it must then be provided by the parents, who work overtime in America's marvelous market economy so their children can spend four years in the care of college professors who despise the market economy and the bourgeois buffoons who work in it overtime so they can send their kids to college, where, coincidentally, the kids will acquire a degree that does next to nothing to prepare them for working in the market economy.