The "Fiske Guide to Colleges" is probably the best known college guide in the country. This is the guide you will want to buy when you would like to read descriptions of most of the colleges that you have probably heard of. Most of the colleges and universities that the average high school student would be interested in are included. One feature that will appeal to many high school students is the ratings of a college's academics, social life, and quality of life. The social life opportunities at a college are an important consideration to a lot of today's teens. The guide rates the college's social life possibilities on a scale of 1 to 5 - with 5 being the highest. It has a similar 1 to 5 rating of each college's academic credentials that is based upon the school's reputation, the quality of its faculty, the quality of its facilities, the academic abilities of its students, and the academic seriousness of its students and faculty. There is also a 1 to 5 rating for the quality of life a school offers it students. This rating, however, seems somewhat difficult to pin down in terms of how it would affect any given student.
In some ways, the "Fiske Guide to Colleges" is the antithesis of books like "Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges". Whereas the "Colleges That Change Lives" book extols the advanages of small liberal arts colleges, the Fiske Guide seems to extol Ivy League and Ivy League wannabe schools. In fact, the author actually hints that the real reason some people say liberal arts colleges provide a better undergraduate education than Ivy League schools is due to sour grapes because they were not smart enough to get into the Ivy League schools!
Regardless of the reasons some people think small liberal arts colleges provide a better undergraduate education, there are some legitimate things to consider about the ratings in the Fiske Guide. First, the ratings and descriptions are subjective. They come from questionaires and interviews with those associated with the colleges. Ideally, it would have been nice if there would be some way to objectively consider every aspect of how a college meets the needs of various types of students. Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do that when considering so many colleges. Second, schools that the guide rates the highest academically tend to be the country's most prestigious schools (i.e., Ivy League and Ivy League wannabe schools), while most small private 4-year colleges are mostly rated academically average. However, the ratings cannot capture the value of smaller class sizes, a closer relationship of professors to their students, and a faculty in general more devoted to teaching than to research and publishing. Third, the guide's academic ratings do not prove that a school with world renown professors will give the typical undergraduate student much (if any) opportunity to learn directly from those professors. In fact, most of their classes will probably be taught by teaching assistants rather than the professors themselves. Finally, while reading the views of students at each college provides useful information about that particular college, it does not provide much in the way of comparative information. Most students will say good things about their colleges during interviews that they know will be published. The interviewed students have not attended the other colleges and are not in position to say their college is better than the others.
Despite its shortcomings, the "Fiske Guide to Colleges" is a valuable resource to have when evaluating colleges and universities. It provides College descriptions, and it includes ratings and statistics that most people will find useful.
