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All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith

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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publishers of "Choosing the Right College," has done it again by compiling yet another meticulously researched and well-written college guide - this time of schools they actually advocate sending your children to.

With its rich descriptions of the campuses and interviews with students and professors, the reader is left with the impression of having actually visited the school. Each entry includes a list of required classes that ISI showcases as proof of the institutions' superior liberal arts educational philosophy - one based solidly on Western culture instead of the "political grievance" and intellectual "junk food" courses offered at the vast majority of American colleges today.

As a conservative, though, I had a problem with a few of the institutions included in the guide. I understand that the guide is also geared toward "old-fashioned liberals," but I found the description of the schools aimed at this group to be too much like the typical, liberal, politically correct institutions that dominate the higher educational landscape. The author of Whitman College's entry, for example, admits that some professors who teach a two-course core sequence called "Antiquity and Modernity," which covers "substantial works in the Western tradition," "hate the course, hate the texts and teach the students to hate them too." Later a Whitman student is quoted as saying, "The political leaning of both the faculty and the student body is so liberal that conservatives like myself are frequently verbally attacked and affronted with regularity. There are no right-leaning politics professors, and it is almost suicide to be a conservative politics major." Yikes! How on Earth did this school get into the guide? The publishers should let the old-fashioned liberals fend for themselves since they have the vast majority of American colleges from which to choose, and narrow this guide for only conservatives and people of faith - maybe replacing some of the more questionable entries with worthier institutions like Hampden-Sydney or Patrick Henry College.

Overall, however, one can do much worse than to send your child to the majority of institutions listed in this book. It's a worthy first effort which I hope will become more finely-tuned toward conservatives and people of faith in later editions.

"All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith" is the MOST comprehensive survey of reliably solid colleges ever compiled.

John Zmirak takes the reader beyond the hollow U.S. News ratings (based on such superficial factors as enrollment, retention rates, etc.) and gets to the heart of each featured institution. Small colleges that would never appear in U.S. News actually feature more motivated faculty, students, and administrators than large state university monstrosities. Zmirak reveals these hidden gems with exceptional honesty, depth, and clarity.

The writing is accessible and a fair substitute for a campus visit, if your reading is supplemented by additional research. Zmirak is the Arthur Frommer of great institutions of higher education.

Choosing a college is the most important decision many students will ever make. If you look at the transfer rates, you'll notice that many mess it up. You can read Kaplan, Princeton Review, and all the rest but only Zmirak's book will help you make the RIGHT choice the FIRST time.

Take a glance at what a year (or more) of wasted education will cost you and I think you will agree that this book is money well spent. If you are going to college because it's the thing "to do", don't waste your time with this book. But if you are going to college to learn and live among the rising thinkers of your time, you cannot afford to omit this book from your reading list!

As I flipped through the reviews in All American Colleges, what first came to mind was why have I never seen anyone else review schools like this before? It's so obvious that the criteria used to evaluate the schools (spelled out in the beginning) is what actually matters in considering where to go to school, that all other guides are exposed to be the silly things they actually are. If simply knowing what SAT thresholds your child must cross to get in, you will be dissapointed how little attention is givin to this and other meaningless things we as parents have been told to use to "check schools out". All the things a real person would actually want and need to know, are covered instead in a smart, thorough manner. The curriculum, the social, political, religious climate...all are addressed in substantive ways. Eventhough these are schools the editor is recommending, the schools don't get free passes. Weak points are addressed. The inspiring essays in the beginning are worth the price of the book alone, even if you have no intention of actually going to school. They are a macro guide to what education is and has always been to those who value learning that will sustain there child through life. While the sub-title suggests this book is for conservatives and cavemen in that lineage, only a fool, fundamentalist, or Gothic dressing Wiccan would be turned off by this book. There's nothing else like it, nothing even comes close as a substitue.

The ALL-AMERICAN COLLEGE GUIDE is a great review of colleges. Zmirak's reviews of the colleges that I am familiar with have been right on. This is another great guide by Zmirak that doesn't leave room for false expectations or hidden surprises. This guide answers a lot of questions, covering areas that I wouldn't have even thought to ask about.

As the majority of state colleges move more and more to the left, indoctrinating students with their own brand of beliefs, its important, as a conservative, for me to attend a school that is private and morally sound. This book is the perfect guide for finding out which colleges are conservatively sound. That doesn't mean that these centers of higher ed. are going to shove conservatism into your heads, but rather, you can rest knowing that they won't inappropriately preach extreme political beliefs.

It's very well organized and researched. ISI really knows its stuff!

I was wondering whether to buy this book, because I am a conservative and a conservative Christian, and I wondered if this would save me a great deal of random searching. I went to the editors website, and there I found a list of all the colleges which are detailed in this book. With the exception of the Catholic colleges (unlike the editor, I am not Catholic), I visited the websites of each of these colleges to find out what they were up to. While a website often does not give a comprehensive view of the College, it does at least present to the world its own view of itself.

On the whole, this book appears to be a very mixed bag. To get included, you apparently have to have a conservative reputation or a "Great Books" kind of curriculum. But neither the curriculum nor past reputation alone really tells you whether a college is conservative or Christian now. Website visits made me question them.

The example of Whitman College cited by an earlier reviewer is a good one. The college itself is stridently environmentalist, and while caring for the environment is not bad, it makes me think the liberals are running the place. Conservative students are apparently complaining. Yet it has an entry in this book. I have to wonder why. Another college in this book just started a gender studies minor -- should not this raise a red flag?

While many of the non-Catholic schools are church affiliated, here again the book is off track, for three colleges are affiliated with notably liberal denominations, namely, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Episcopalians. And one, the Southern Virginia University, is Mormon.

As I looked over some of these websites, seeking overt signs of conservative values and conservative Christianity, I wondered on occasion "What could this editor have been thinking?" In short, this book has some value because it will probably point out some good colleges worth looking into that you never heard of. But numerically, these good colleges with up-front conservative values seem to be distinctly in the minority in this book, and you will have to do your homework to ferret them out. To the degree that this book promises a well vetted list of demonstrably conservative institutions, it simply does not deliver. Like the previous reviewer who wonders about why Patrick Henry was not included, I wonder about Cedarville University, Evangel University and many others. Too many colleges that should be here are not here and too many that should not be are.

This book is a starting point for a few ideas but you will still have a lot of searching ahead of you. It is worth buying with caution.

Compiled by Intercollegiate Studies Institute, All American Colleges: Top Schools For Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith is a practical, no-nonsense profile of fifty colleges especially suitable for prospective students with specific values and educational goals - ones who seek learning grounded in concepts of liberty, and education as an enrichment in the process of understanding what it means to be a "good" or "free" person. In other words, institutions that are not so radicalized as to attack fundamental concepts such as abstract truth or disinterested, unbiased scholarship. The medley of schools surveyed include a broad range of religious colleges, as well as secular schools for conservatives and "old-fashioned" liberals in the tradition of John F. Kennedy and George McGovern. From Catholic colleges to Southern military academies to Quaker and Mennonite schools to evangelical Christian universities, All American Colleges spans the gamut of faiths and interests. Each school profile offers vital statistics (enrollment numbers, freshman retention rate, graduation rate, courses with fewer than 20 students, etc.), lists of what courses all students are required to take, several pages summarizing what the college offers and the nature of its environment. An excellent starter guide for learning more about and possibly choosing a higher-education institution with good old-fashioned moral values.

Zmirak, who is the brain behind the much more widely available "Choosing the Right College" provides us with a much smaller list of colleges that he recommends as good places to go to school. The primary criteria here are that they a core curriculum and that the atmosphere of the school it not stifling for those with conservative viewpoints. Not surprisingly, he ends up with a list of primarily small religious liberal arts colleges. There are some surprises on the list (such as Pentecostal school Lee University) and some schools that one feels have to stretch to meet the definition. Princeton, for example is a school that conservatives have come to believe is the most open of the ivies, based on the presence of a single high profile conservative professor. I didn't find that argument particularly compelling. I also wonder why some schools didn't make the list.. Was it the core? Where are places like such as Baylor, CUA, Christendom? We seem to be missing some key options that lay in the middle of the spectrum between Princeton and Grove City.

This book was valuable primarily as a starting point before looking into the full "Right College" guide. If you're looking for a college which will not undermine the values you've taught your children - and as a parent you should consider that before paying the kind of money that college costs - this guide will help you get oriented to what kinds of options are out there, but you are going to need the "Right College" to get the full picture. Both guides do something that no other guide does -- talk about what kind of education your child will actually get. You can learn more about environment, prestige, etc, elsewhere, but at the end of the day, aren't you paying for education?

I think it would be neat for Zmirak to move into the realm of graduate schools as well.

"'All American Colleges'" is a terrific guide to help conservatives choose a college that's NOT committed to leftwing indoctrination. If you graduate from one of these lesser known colleges, you might even become President of the United States as Ronald Reagan did."
--Phyllis Schlafly, founder, Eagle Forum