The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition (College Admissions Guides) [Paperback]

Princeton Review (Author)

Book Description

Series: College Admissions Guides | Publication Date: July 28, 2009

What makes The Best 371 Colleges the most popular college guide?

The Best 371 Colleges is a comprehensive college guide written for any student or parent mystified by the confusing college admissions process. This essential college-planning guide, from the experts at The Princeton Review, provides the facts about the best schools in the country, popular college ranking lists, and the information needed to make a smart decision about which schools to consider.

Revealing answers from college students cover each school’s unique character and give you extensive insight into their classes, financial aid, social life, and everything in between. Students are the experts, after all, and we talked to 122,000 of them!

•One-of-a-kind college rankings reveal the top colleges in 62 categories based on how students at the schools–the real experts! –rated their colleges. The ranking lists include:
-Top Professors  
-Best Financial Aid
-Best Career/Job Placement Services
-Best Classroom Experiences
-Top Party Schools
-Dorms Like Palaces 
-Best Athletic Facilities 
-Best Campus Food
-Most Politically Active Students
-Most Diverse Student Population
-Class Discussions Encouraged
-Best College Newspaper 
-…and many more!    

•Learn what you can do in high school to prepare yourself for admission to a selective college  
•Get all the application essentials–tuition, admissions criteria, deadlines, phone numbers, addresses, demographics, student/faculty ratios, and most popular majors–for quick reference and easy comparison when you’re narrowing down your choices
•Green college ratings help readers find out if schools are environmentally friendly
•Special section on great colleges for the 15 most popular majors
•An Index of Schools by Cost allows you to search all colleges in the book by price  

 What the media is saying about The Best 371 Colleges from The Princeton Review: 

“The offbeat indexes, along with the chattily written descriptions of each school, provide
a colorful picture of each campus.”–The New York Times

“The most efficient of the college guidebooks. Has entertaining profiles larded with quotes from students.”–Rolling Stone

“A great book…it’s a bargain.” –CNN

“Our favorite college guidebook.” –Seventeen

“Provides the kind of feedback students would get from other students in a campus visit.” –USA Today

Product Details

• Paperback: 832 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Review; Original edition (July 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375429387
• ISBN-13: 978-0375429385
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 1.7 x 10.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #316,561 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best college-search book, bar none, August 5, 2009

By 

Paul Allaer (Cincinnati) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition (College Admissions Guides) (Paperback)

The Princetown Review publishes a number of college search-related books, including the "Complete Book of Colleges" and this one. This book is essentially a distilled version of the "Complete Book", and frankly a lot more useful (but for people completely new to the college-searching process, definitely check that out too).

"The Best 371 Colleges (2010 Edition)" (832 pages) is similar to last year's edition. After holding the number of best colleges at 368 last year (remember this book started off in 1992 with the best 350), this time there are 5 new "best" colleges and 2 that didn't make the cut anymore, and so now we have 371 (if the inflation of "best" colleges continues, I surmise we'll get to 400 eventually). Those 5 new colleges are Angelo State University, Green Mountain College, Marywood University, Stonehill College, and the University of Charleston. There is a fun-to-browse 62 lists of best/worst, such as "Most Beautiful Campus", "Students Study the Most", "Party Schools", and "Most Politically Active Students" (my daughter is attending the No.2 ranked school on that list, it was ranked No.1 last year, so yes these rankings change from year to year).

The best feature of this guide remains the 2 page layout for each of the colleges, with in-depth information on campus life, academic selectivity (the number of applicants, how many were accepted, and of those how many actually decided to attend), up-to-date tuition and room/board costs (I checked the numbers of the college that my daughter is now attending, and they are accurate), etc. Another aspect that is very helpful is the "Survey says" sidebar, in which the essence of the university is distilled from the college students themselves, and "The Inside Word" segment on how tough it really is to gain admission when all is said and done.

The proof is in the pudding: of the many college guides out there, my daughter spent more time with this book (when she was looking at colleges a few years ago) than with any other. This book is not the first place to start the college search, but once your son or daughter has narrowed down his/her colleges of choice, and assuming those colleges are featured in the "best 371", this book clearly is the best resource, the last step before a campus visit, and can be used again following the campus visits. I've looked at a lot of college-search books and if I was forced to recommend only one book among all the college search guides, this book is clearly it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars missing some very crucial information, June 26, 2010

By 

Gilgamesh "desert runner" (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition (College Admissions Guides) (Paperback)

This book has good info on SAT scores and GPA's and college costs. It gives insight into the admissions philosophies of the colleges. It gives very heavy emphasis to students' views of the feel and social/party aspects of the schools, and many schools end up sounding alike - I would say over half of them in this book feature comments like 'hard liquor is popular on campus', 'social life is dominated by frats', etc. That is certainly good info to have.

The major shortcoming of this book, as I see it, is that it says virtually nothing substantive about the college's actual academic programs and requirements. My son is looking at Ivy League schools, and there is no info in this book about the differences in core requirements between the different Ivy League schools. It wasn't until we were on the student tour at Princeton that we learned that Princeton has a required senior thesis that averages, according to our guide, 80 pages, and that, because of this, virtually no student double majors. This same guide informed us about Columbia's Core Curriculum, heavily based on the Classics, that every student must take. Brown, he told us, is the most flexible Ivy, and has no core requirements. Well, for my son, anyway, all that was vital information and it mattered a lot more to him than some subjective student comments such as 'Everyone likes the Tigers' or 'All the students here are really friendly.'

The info we were seeking is all available online, at each college's website, of course. But it sure would be nice if college guide book writers would actually do a bit more work and write some substantive information about the academic requirements of each school.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kid friendly, September 13, 2009

By 

R. Burnell (Mendocino, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition (College Admissions Guides) (Paperback)

We used the last edition for our son and found it to be very well designed with information for both parents and kids. This edition has lived in our daughter's room as she combs through it. With all the access information right at the top of the page contacting the schools is made easy. Also the student's point of view area rings true. It is a good buy.