Customer Reviews

The Best 361 Colleges, 2007 Edition (College Admissions Guides)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

"The Best 361 Colleges (2007 Edition)" (795 pages)is very similar to last year's edition. For once the number of the "best" colleges has not increased, and that's a good thing in my opinion. Two colleges no longer made the cut and in their place are newcomers Occidental College and Westminster College. 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, tuiion and room/board costs, etc. Having the latest "hard data and figures" is the main reason to buy this book again, even though otherwise it is very similar to last year's edition.

The proof is in the pudding: of the many college guides out there, my daughter (now a junior) is spending more time with this book than with any other. This book is not the first palce to start the college search, but once your son or daughter has narrowed down his/her field of choice, and assuming those colleges are featured in the "best 361", this book clearly is the best resource and the last step before a campus visit.

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.

One qualifier there is very little difference between the 2007 and the 2006 editions.

We read and re-read this book, cross-referencing with other like material, but this one is good at comparing apples to apples between most of the colleges we would consider. We have the book and I bought this one as a gift for my niece. Would recommend to anyone researching a quality education for use with other materials on the vast and ever-interesting subject of college selection.

I used this book as my primary source of college research. I went through every single school in the book and narrowed down my choices based on the criteria important to me. Eventually, I applied to a handful of schools and was accepted at my top choice. Everything this book revealed about the college I chose was fairly accurate, and I was overjoyed with my college experience. I couldn't afford to fly all over the country and visit every school I was interested in, so this guide was indispensable.

I saw the 2005 edition of this guide at one of the colleges we visited and really liked it. So I bought it. However the new 2007 edition is so much tamer and more politically correct than the earlier one that it is much more boring and much less helpful than the 2005 version. The student comments have been totally watered down and the star ratings are gone.

Bottom line: you're much better off getting your hands on a used copy of the 2005 edition (which is called The best 357 Colleges).

Convenient reference which nicely summarizes much of the information that one can get online.

I have looked at a lot of college books, and this is the best I have found. The great thing is that there are 361, this is enough so that you have plenty of places to look at, but not to many so that it is overwhelming.

The organization is great. The colleges are alphabetical, but there is an index in the back if you want to look at colleges by state. All of the statistics line the outside of the pages. The statistics are very helpful. The rest of the college is divided into Academics, Life, Student Body, Admissions, The Inside Word, Financial Aid, and From the Admissions Office. These are compiled by responses given by the students, so you don't get answers that seem fake and to good to be true. They are honest if there is a problem.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who is deciding what college to go to.

In beginning the search for my daughters college experience, this book has provided a great start. It outlines so much detail in terms of common majors, average GPA's and test scores, out of state admission percentages, etc.. It also gives you a true idea as to the students, administrators and professers involvement and feelings regarding the school and surrounding communities. Many schools you know of by 'name', but this book gives you details of what's behind that name, and additionally, informed us of some awesome schools we had never heard of. I would recommend this book for both students and parents.

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:
Great Campus Food
Is This Food?

I'm not quite sure just how they picked 361 colleges instead of 358 or 401, but you gotta stop somewhere.

Easily one of the best college reference books.

I have used this book more than the US News and World report. I give this book more value than the other one. I like the student reviews.