Customer Reviews

Fiske Guide to Colleges 1998: The Highest-Rated Guide to the Best and Most Interesting Colleges in America

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A valuable resource, particularly when used in conjunction with the Princeton Review and Yale books. Evaluative material like this always requires healthy skepticism - that goes double for anonymous book critiques!

While the Fiske Guide may be biased on some regards it is overall an excellent resource for students looking into colleg. It represents the top schools in the country and presents very viable information. Furthermore, I was admitted and visited Duke, Stanford, UPenn, Tufts, Georgetown, Yale, Brown. Each essay accurately reflected the feel or aura of the school.

The college advising at my high school was notoriously weak; thus, my parents hired a private counseling consultant to help me during the college admissions process. She introduced me to the Fiske Guide. I IMMEDIATELY LOVED IT! Unlike most other books, which supply the same old information in the same conventional way (admissions:..., campus life:...), this book paints a great picture of what the college is really like. It does not bombard you with a barrage of statistics, but does provide an adequate amount, accompanied by brilliantly written text. Of course, I may not have agreed with everything Fiske said about my school, but I think he made some thoughtful comments about what to expect. So, though I don't wholeheartedly agree with Fiske's reviews, I concede that no book about colleges can top it--not Barron's, not the College Board, not the Princeton Review, NOTHING. Kudos to Fiske for this outstanding guide!

I serve on college accreditation teams. We visit colleges and talk with students and faculty, often at random. We review curriculum, finances, etc. There is, even at most name-brand colleges, plenty of bad along with the good. If however, you read the Fiske Guide to Colleges, 99% of the evaluative statements about 99% of the colleges are positive. It is terribly misleading. The author should be ashamed of himself.

I resent the fact that some people think that Fiske just gets the admissions departments to write the blurbs. Not true at all. I'm a student at Whitman College, and am right now writing a review for Fiske. So, it's not all propaganda, but truth, straight from students' mouths. I'm writing a rave review about my school, Whitman, by the way.

Each college's review is based on a handful of questionnaires completed by students who are HAND-PICKED by the administration--usually their student assistants and/or other students known to love the school--e.g., the tour guides. This is incredibly biased. Also, the cover of the book touts it as "The best"--grossly misleading--it was cited as best by the BOOKSELLERS Association--judging it on its sales not its quality.

We had a list of eight popular colleges we wanted to research and only one was listed in this book. We found the book to be VERY limited and nearly useless.

When I was in high school, I thought this book was the Bible. It isn't. Since I have been in college I have found that the book attempts to give a taste of the flavor of the colleges, and it fails miserably. With respect to colleges in Texas, at least, it captures neither the true strengths of the colleges nor the the real weaknesses. Take a tour of four colleges that you might like to attend during the summer or Christmas of your senior year. Summer is best, since class will be in session, but you HAVE to visit to have any idea what the school is like. Asking older friends what the strengths and weaknesses of their colleges are will also be more productive. Find another book that evaluates colleges based on the academic strengths of the college within the field you wish to pursue, if you must buy a book and if such a book exists. In short, don't waste your money on this one.

More phony college propaganda and advertising! The trick is to pick which college's admissions office actually wrote the text