From Diapers to Diploma: A Healthier Way to Navigate Your Child's Path to College

Increasingly, American parents start worrying about college admissions when their children are barely out of diapers. And by middle school, kids have been thrust into the competition for the Ivy Leagues. But that's a dangerous game, one that teaches kids a curious set of values, sets too many of them up for disappointment and perverts the true purpose of education. It's also built on a myth: that success hinges on going to a highly selective school. Frank Bruni talked to us about a better, healthier way to think about and approach all of this, distilling the research, life stories and advice in his new book Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania which was published on March 17th.

Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since June 2011, joined the newspaper in 1995 and has ranged broadly across its pages. He has been both a White House correspondent and the chief restaurant critic. Mr. Bruni is the author of two New York Times best sellers: a 2009 memoir Born Round about the joys and torments of his eating life, and a 2002 chronicle of George W. Bush's initial presidential campaign Ambling into History. His new book Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania was published in March 2015. In his columns, which appear every Sunday and Wednesday, he reflects on diverse topics: American politics, higher education, violence in football, gay rights and his own life as a gay man in a close-knit family. Mr. Bruni grew up in White Plains, NY and Avon, Conn. He is a 1986 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and earned a B.A. in English. He earned an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 1988, graduating second in his class and winning a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.