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This book rates college on academic as well as social factors so you can see if you fit in to that campus. You can read about dorms, party atmosphere, and what current students are like.
One feature that I felt was great was... "if you like a certain college you may want to look at"... This allows you to add new schools to consider.
My high school daughter continually used this book to make her choice. I highly reccomend this book!
The information in here is both pertinent and useful. The book includes such facts as diversity profiles, student survey results, average high school GPA of entering freshmen, and school-specific admissions advice.
Pick up The Best 351 Colleges today. You won't regret this purchase.
The best college guide is "Getting into the right college." The most important concept in this book is that college searching is a matching process. You are not begging the colleges to accept you. You are trying to find the ones that match you. Too many students are selecting colleges based on their name and fame, and not whether they match the students' ability, personality, ethos, etc. This book sets the students in the right direction by firstly doing a self-survey in order to produce a set of criteria for college matching.
For students that want to reform the society, "Make a difference college & graduate guide" has the colleges and universities that foster and cultivate social activism. On the other hand, a conservative student or parent can use this guide to avoid the schools listed in this book.
Now, getting back to this book, it is a very good guide. The term "best colleges," which is part of the title of the book, is not defined in this book. Even the author admitted that there is no objective standard in selecting these 351 colleges and universities. They were chosen only based on some experts' opinions. How should one objectively define a college as among the best? Certainly not the selectivity! For it only indicates the quality of the entering class of students. It does not indicate the transformational work that the college is going to perform on the student. How many of us judge a restaurant by the quality of meat it buys and not the food it serves us? Do we buy a car because of the quality of steel the car manufacture buys or the quality of the finished product? Is a movie rated by its star roster or the quality of the movie itself? Focusing on selectivity is only looking at the input. Instead, students and parents should look at the output, the finished products. That's what counts. The output of a college is its graduates. So, the real measure of a good college is the quality and performance of its graduates: What are the GRE scores of its graduates? What are their MCAT or LSAT scores? What's the percentage of its graduates obtaining PhDs? What's the percentage of its premed students entering medical schools? What percentage of its graduates are high achievers in the society?
Reed College maintains a web page which has the colleges and universities that have the highest productivity on PhDs: http://web.reed.edu/ir/phd.html. High school students and parents should go and see this page. You will be shocked to find out that very few Ivy League colleges made the list. Instead, you will see some no-name schools that actually have done some wonderful transformational work on their students. For example, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, Reed and Swarthmore are the top four schools in the nation as far as producing PhDs is concerned. There is also an excellent report online that is done by Research Corporation: http://www.rescorp.org/AE-rpt3.pdf. If you check tables 1, 2 and 3 in this report, you will again see some no-name schools top the list for producing PhDs.
Again, getting back to this book, it is an excellent guide. It is full of useful descriptions by the college students of each school and they are pretty much on the mark. This book is good as a first filter. After you have selected some colleges you like from this book, then check with "Make a difference college & graduate guide" and "Choosing the right college" to make sure you like the social and political atmosphere on these campuses. Of course, I highly recommend Reed College's website and the report by Research Corp. Check out the top colleges in these two sources before you start applying to any colleges.
This book deserves a 4-star. I owned three editions of this book: 2002, 2003 and 2004. The content didn't change much from one edition to another, but that doesn't diminish its value. It has pretty accurate descriptions of the colleges and universities. The three sections I considered most useful are "Students Speak Out - Academics," "Students Speak Out - Life" and the amazingly accurate sidebar "Survey Says..." This is the best first-filter book out there on the bookshelf!
This guide provides so much more data than the U.S. News college ranking. There are over 60 college ranking categories associated with academics, quality of life, financial aid, and many other factors. Each schools are rated along three major factors: Campus Life, Academics, Selectivity. The feedback from students is invaluable, because this is how you find the real dope on any aspect of a specific college.
There are several great tools associated with this book located at the Princeton Review website. One of them include a free online application utility where you can save you data. So, you don't need to reenter your personal data when you apply to different school.
But, the most incredible tool is the Counselor-O-Matic feature. You enter your GPA, test scores (or what you anticipate these will be), and your preferences in terms of size, type, and another 20 or more defining categories. Out of the 351 school database, the Counsel-O-Matic gives you a selection of 5 best matches for your Reach, Match, and Safe school. If you register at the site (free), you will get 20 choices in each category (total 60). If you then click on any of the choices, you can get a ton of information regarding student feedback, rankings in academics, quality of life and many other categories. You also get a profile of the freshman class GPA, and test scores. You also get info of what is really important for the admission officers from this specific school. These represent invaluable tips that will maximize your chance of getting in.
All the information extracted from the website is included in the book. The website is just a nifty way of using database technology to query and extract the relevant information you want.
Publishing industry representatives participate in the common data set initiative (see www.commondataset.org). Why can't they pressure colleges and universities to release their data? Furthermore, many of the 351 top schools are public institutions and subject to state Freedom of Information Acts. The college guidebook industry needs to become more assertive.
As it is, drawing on the common data set for most of its hard data, this guide resembles most other available college guides. No better, no worse. It provides some impressionistic information under the general rubric "students speak out," but putting this anecdotal information into any meaningful context is almost impossible.
Totally absent is score information from tests taken by students in college, such as the Medical College Admissions Test, Law School Admissions Test, Graduate Record Examinations, or Graduate Management Admissions Test; yet, these scores would seem to reflect college achievement. This guide only lists information on test scores taken by entering high school students (for example, the SAT I, ACT, etc.).
Little evident use is made of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). All freshmen and seniors at participating schools must take the survey, which questions students about their classroom experience, study habits and homework assignments, and asks them to evaluate the quality of education they receive. Unlike standardized tests, the survey depends entirely on subjective responses, and no attempt is made to assess what is actually learned in the classroom. Granted most schools try to hide NSSE information, but a proactive publishing industry should be able to obtain it.
College guidebook publishers seem content to generate public interest by upgrading and downgrading schools in their rankings. They expend minimal resources in seeking new information or attempting new ways of viewing how well colleges and universities educate. That's a shame, for they shortchange the American consumer who is being asked to spend increasingly large sums, often going into debt for years, on higher educational services.
So it's a really good starting point, but don't expect to find your dream college using this book.
The Best 351 Colleges in the US... Surely mine was one of them, I thought, as I pulled the book off the shelf and began reading it. As I thumbed through the pages, different short..."pithy narratives" really is the right term... caught my eye. One of the things different about this rating system was that it was put together by interviewing students who had been to these colleges. Well... who better?
One of the 351 was a technology institute in New Jersey. What kind of place was that? The book said that it gave a lot of bang for the buck even though there was a high cost of living in the area. Small student to teacher ratio. Musical organizations were not popular. Very little beer or liquor use among the students. Most students were commuters. Of course this meant that there was a lack of community life. I figured a lot of students commuted in order to better their careers rather than get their first experience of college.
The college with the best academic rating was Yale. My college was not listed at all. Drat. Even so Best 351 tries to take the PAIN out of APPLICATION. I think it does a great job.
What IS most helpful about this book is that it gives pretty on the ball descriptions of the colleges. Most schools we visited really did seem like their PR description. Granted, nothing replaces a visit, but if you know that you don't want a school dominated by Greek life and the PR says "Frats dominate the social scene" you will also know that maybe you shouldn't bother to visit at all.
This is a good book to get started when you're first looking around, and making a list of "schools to visit." It should be noted, though, that only the highly selctive, well known (relatively), or popular State/City colleges tend to make the book. There are many fine colleges that don't make the book- they tend to be either less selective or less known. For example, all Ivy League, Seven Sister, Big Name Sport Schools, and Big State Universities make the list. But while "Brooklyn College" makes the list (it's a popular New York City college) many finer, better "ranked", but lesser known colleges do not. Also, with the exception of the city/state colleges in this book, most schools profiled are looking for at minimum 1150-1200 SATs and a B average and three school activities to a maximum of 1550 SAT, A average, and a resume to rival God. If you're not a good, active student, this may not be the book for you.
Happy Hunting. I'll be glad to bring my offspring to college this weekend.
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined
them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?
Q: What does a WASP Mom make for dinner?
A: A crisp salad, a hearty soup, a lovely entree, followed by
a delicious dessert.
