Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Colleges 2008

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I know many college experts feel that the best book on the colleges is Fiske, but it is a bit light on student viewpoint. In contrast, College Prowler's Big Book of Colleges is a very good resource of student opinion. (It's similar to the website, CampusDirt.com, but generally more thorough.) However, the college books that rely heavily on student views share the problem of excessive subjectivity. To be fair, College Prowler readily admits that students are not uniform at different schools, and it's not easy for students to compare their experiences with those at other colleges. A student that rated academics at her school a B- might have given it an A if she'd been exposed to the same courses at several other schools, but there's no way for her to know. The students who only rated George Washington University's diversity a C+ have no idea how truly un-diverse a small, rural college can be. Even students who transfer probably couldn't be familiar with more than two or three institutions. Still, for many of the graded categories such as campus dining, safety, parking, and housing, this book is probably accurate in assessing how happy a typical student would be with each school. Since the Big Book of Colleges delivers a wider variety of opinions than some of the guides, you will get some contradictions. At one school, a student said "it's not a great idea to walk around campus at night" while another said "campus security is so good, I feel totally safe going for a run at midnight." You'll frequently have opinions that say "dorms are plush" and "dorms are nasty" for the same school. However, each school's entry has an author who generally does a good job of evaluating the differing opinions and putting them in perspective.

Here's where this book totally falls down: Selectivity. They claim the University of Michigan is "less selective." They claim that Bryn Mawr and Carnegie-Mellon are at the same level of selectivity as Slippery Rock and Tennessee State. No, no, no. They rate selectivity entirely on the percentage of students admitted which means they don't understand the concept of a "self-selecting applicant pool." Sure, some colleges aren't going to get the thousands of "not-a-chance" applications that Harvard, Brown or NYU will receive which means they accept a much larger percentage of applicants, but if you don't have high grades or test scores, you will not get in. The worrisome thing about this is that if this book is a student's only resource, he or she may think a school is a safety when that's not at all true. While it's not perfect, Barron's Profiles of American Colleges has what I feel is the most accurate and thorough analysis of selectivity although in the past they've provided SAT medians as opposed to a range of scores which isn't as helpful. The College Board guide (and website) do a decent job with selectivity and explaining a student's chances as does Princeton Review with its thorough freshman class profiles.

This leads us to College Prowler's shortage of statistics. Honestly, this book discusses each college more thoroughly than Princeton Review or Yale Insider's (although not Fiske), and if you search through each college's entry you will find important information on freshmen retention and graduation rates. However there is some info missing, particularly on financial aid such as average grant size and average amount of need met. (As a matter of fact, The Big Book of Colleges claims it is "filled with financial aid resources." Really? Where? I didn't see them.) The other guides (Princeton Review, Insider's, Fiske) are far better with statistics.

The Big Book of Colleges only lists about 250 schools which isn't really enough. There are many top schools they left out (i.e. University of the South, Worcester Polytechnic, Wofford, Austin College, Knox, Hendrix, Lawrence) that Fiske and Princeton Review did not. On the other hand, this book does have more pages on each school than the others (although partially because, with lots of separated text boxes and headers, it does not use space effectively), and it's already kind of expensive compared to other choices.

College Prowler is a bit quirky. It's probably the only guide that will have a glossary defining both "beer pong" and "mushrooms" as well as "early decision" and "rolling admissions". At times it's a bit more fun than other guides (under Wilkes University it tells you which buildings are haunted), with some emphasis on how hot the guys or girls are, giving it a more authentic feel that this is really written for students. One thing that's a big improvement over Insider's is that they've managed to present (fairly) unbiased portrayals of the universities by students who actually know the schools well. Also, most of these guides are guilty of recycling entries year after year, and since College Prowler is fairly new, chances are that the info is close to current.

So basically I purchased this book for a few reasons:
1. I had asked my mom for a college book to help me figure out what schools I am interested in. She begrudgingly agreed. I picked the U.S. News Ultimate College Guide 2008 thinking that it was massive and therefore would contain all of the information I could ever want.... it didn't.
2. During this whole college selection process I have developed a weird/nerdy/neuorotic obsession with learning everything I can about the subject. I wanted to feed my thirst for knowledge!! I thought that the Big Book of Colleges would give me more information about the social aspects of different schools (plus the student comments sounded totally rad). This time I recieved the book as a gift.

I guess ultimately I was dissapointed by this guide. I was really put off by all of the gross/brutal statements that students made about their classmates looks, actions, attitudes. This book turned me off from the whole idea of college. Ya, I know that there are out of control parties involving beer, drugs, and whatever else but I was hoping that all of this was avoidable if you didn't want to be a part of it. I felt that this book was written under the assumption that all teens are vapid, arrogant, and irresponsible. That definitly isn't the case. I guess that this book could spur curiosity in kids that aren't interested in your typical college book format. Though I wouldn't recommend it I suppose parents could buy it for there teens in an effort to get them involved in the college selection process. Whatever the case I wasn't crazy about this book. It wasn't worth the money.