Customer Reviews

Best 361 Colleges, 2006 (College Admissions Guides)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just received this book. The second school profile I turned to (Stanford University) was completely botched. While the narrative text seems to be about Stanford, the sidebars full of statistical information is obviously not related to Stanford. I have no idea what school it belongs to - but it lists Stanford as a "public" institution with an in-state tuition of just a few thousand dollars annually. I wish. Lucky for me I knew enough about the school to recognize these patent errors.

Now I am left to wonder what other information in this book is completely off the mark? Everything else I have read seems to fit what I know about the schools, but I don't know that much about many of the schools reviewed.

This is the best college guide for students with SAT scores above 1100. I don't reccomend it for students will lower scores because it concentrates on schools that expect a higher SAT.
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 son continually used this book to help make his choice. I highly reccomend this book! My daughter used an earlier version to pick her school.

You will continually come back to using this book.

To be perfectly honest, I prefer Fiske as I feel it is the most informative in regards to the academic strengths of each school. It's positive and relatively unbiased while being just critical enough that you know it's not a mere mouthpiece for the admissions departments. I think parents will like it best.

However, students will probably not. It's pretty dry. Princeton Review is less factual, but much better reading, even providing an occasional chuckle. Still, these other reviewers are right. There is some incorrect and/or confusing information and these books cannot replace campus tours and talking to current students.

As for the other guides, I think that the Insider's Guide is gossipy, negative to the point that it portrays schools inaccurately, and provides too little information about the schools' programs. On the other extreme, Peterson's Guide to Competitive Colleges isn't very useful at all either as it offers nothing but statistics that can be found elsewhere. The possible exception to that is Peterson's inclusion of more Christian schools than the other guides would be helpful to some families who want someone to tell them which religious schools are most selective. (And by the way, Princeton Review is by far the best choice for kids researching Historically African-American universities.) Kaplan is very good as I feel it is less biased than Princeton Review while providing a bit more information on life outside the classroom than Fiske. However, I still find that Kaplan, like Fiske, is a little lifeless. So while I think Fiske and Kaplan are better, I feel that, unless you have a self-motivated and intellectual child, if you want your student to get involved in doing his or her own research on the schools, Princeton Review is the way to go.

We used a previous version of this book when my first child was applying to colleges in 2003, and found it helpful. The current edition was a disappointment because of obvious errors. In addition to the Stanford error, the Northwestern evaluation was completely illogical. After stating that Northwestern is "one of the most academically rigorous (schools)in the country,"with an "applicant pool that is easily among the best in the country," the book gives an academic rating of 77. That is the same rating given, for example, to St. Bonaventure University, which ranks high on the "lots of hard liquor" and "students almost never study" lists. It is interesting to note that three years ago, Northwestern topped the "best overall academic experience for undergraduates list" with an academic rating in the high 90's. It is now ranked more than 20 points lower. Since both reviews cannot possibly be correct, one is forced to conclude that the authors are either biased or careless. I was left feeling that I could not trust the data presented, and will be using a different book for reference when my second child applies to college.

The real advantage to this guide, like the Yale Guide to the Colleges, is that kids tend to read, if not devour, it. Since buying it for our two daughters, I have recommended it to several other parents, advising them just to leave it out, either on a living room table or in the bathroom (It makes great john reading). In all cases the kids have found it interesting, relevant and credible. Is it the final word? Not at all. But it does serve as a great starting point for kids to put together a list of schools in which they might be interested.

The obvious errors in key data on Stanford undermine this book's credibility. What other errors are also in the book?
I have been requesting from Princeton Review/Random House a full listing of corrections, but they are silent.
It's too bad, because this was becoming my favorite guidebook. The rankings are engaging, and I particularly like the underlying message: selectivity is not the same as quality. Some great schools are not super-selective; and some super-selective schools may not provide a top education to undergrads.

As a warning, this refers primarily to older editions. However, I have seen the newer editions and a lot of the online portions of this book and I think that this still applies.

Anyway, this is very helpful in that actual students were surveyed. I used this book during my college search and am now in college, and the Princeton Review rankings seem to reflect prevailing opinions pretty well and many of their comments were accurate. It is a good way to get a sense of the campus. It goes beyond "what the admission officer tells you about the college" to what actual students say.

Although this book represented a good effort overall, and is very helpful, I cannot rate it 5 stars because of the following weakesses. If you use this book, I recommend keeping these in mind:
1. Do not rely on this book (or any college guidebook) as your only source of information about a college. Always double-check stuff like the availability of majors, average SAT scores, etc. with the schools themselves, as I have noticed occational inaccuracies in this data. The last thing you want is to get to college and realize that they don't have your program of study or something like that. This may seeem like a stupid point, but believe it or not, people have done that. Whatever you do, don't end up having to transfer because you didn't do your research.
2. Technically the surveys that the book is based on are bias-proned because their design is one of a voluntary response to a survey rather than an SRS (random sample) of college students. This type of survey (voluntary response) may be systematically biased because people with strong opinions, particularly strong negative opinions, are most likely to respond to the survey.
3. I question how much difference there is between numbers on the lists. For example, is there really that much of a difference between the college rated #1 for food and the one rated #2, or even between the one rated #1 and the one rated #20? Also be aware that the methodologies used to catagorize colleges as the "best" 361 colleges are not necessarily that well publicized and not all guidance counsollers agree with the methodologies used (what defines what the "best" college is?). In any case, though, the rankings do generally reflect reality (e.g. if a school made the list for "best library," they probably really do have a good library), they choose very good quotes from students and describe campuses fairly accurately (speaking for my campus at least, they did a good job describing it), and the colleges that made the book really are very good colleges.
4. Their methods are not always well published (what, exactly, makes a college one of the "best 361" anyway? How do you decide really?). I have a theory (and I use that in the colloquial sense rather than the technical sense) that it doesn't make nearly as much of a difference as they say it does where you go to school. I recently read about a study in which they compared two groups of people - group A was accepted to an Ivy League university but attended somewhere else that had a good reputation but wasn't Ivy League, and group B was accepted to an Ivy League university and attended. They found that group B (who went to the Ivy League university) was no more successful than group A who didn't go to an Ivy League school! That is, in my opinion, a weakness of this book, that it may lead you to believe that where you go makes much more of a difference than it actually does.
5. This book cannot and should not substitute for a campus tour. In fact, no college brochure or guidebook, no matter how good it is, can really substitute for that. Quite a few people have made college decisions without actually going on college tours before and have ended up making decisions that they regretted. Make sure that you see the campus and read the college's literature, but also make sure to read unbiased, third-party information about colleges.

Helpful overall. I definitely recommend reading it, although not uncritically or without "a grain of salt." I'm not entirely sure that it is worth buying, I just got it from the library and looked at their lists online, but owning it could be helpful I guess.

The nice thing about this book is its philosophy of asking the students at the schools to rate the colleges they attend. That way you get the low down on things like the quality of life, cafeteria food, social life, political leaning, all in all some 60 categories. That's in addition, of course to the standard information that you'd get from the school itself like admissions criteria, deadlines, phone numbers etc.

You've got to enjoy some of the categories in which colleges are ranked: Under Politics:
Students Most Nostalgic for Ronald Reagan
Students Most Nostalgic for Bill Clinton
Students Most Politically Active
Election? What Election?

Under Food:
Best Campus Food
Is It Food?

There are about 3,500 colleges and universities in the United States. Selecting the 361 to feature here is a combination of science and art. At the top is certainly a set of schools like Harvard or Stanford that will be on any list. As you get down into the hundreds there is more choice. After a while geographic diversity, rounding out the variety eventually has to get down to a feeling that we want this one more than that one. You may disagree, but this is the editors choice of the top 10% of the schools in America.

Easily one of the best college reference books.

I think that this book is, well, too full of receycled information, myths, stereotypes, and other questionable descriptions. If you want hard data - go the internet, preferably individual school's web sites. If you want a comprehensive directory to colleges, Barrons is better.

Overall, this book is one of the better college guides out there - it's well-organized, clean, and very useful for students, parents, and teachers alike, and it's easy to read, and does elicit laughter and chuckles.

The fact that most of the information in this book was gathered from students really shows - if you can't make it to a college to visit, this book would help quite well in describing the overall atmosphere of the college, but it's a bit sparse on the academic details of the colleges.

There are, however, a couple of glaring errors/omissions - for some really odd reason, Stanford is listed as being a public university. Though this may seem like a minor problem, the fact remains that it's such a basic fact that the Princeton Review, with all its money and resources should not have overlooked.

Secondly, the University of California - Irvine has strangely been omitted from the book. However, the much less-renowned UC Riverside is actually still in the book - many of my fellow classmates were shocked not to see UC Irvine in the book - especially when considering the college's strengths in the sciences. It's also surprising since UCI was included in the previous editions of this book (The Best 357 Colleges).