Customer Reviews

The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, 2006: Students on Campus Tell You What You Really Want to Know, 32nd Edition (Insiders' Guide to the Colleges: ... Campus Tell You What You Really Want to Know)

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

 

 

This book isn't written by students. Read the fine print. What a sham!

They get a LOT of their facts wrong.

They boil down each school to innacurate stereotypes. In the end, you have barely any idea what it's like to actually GO there!

If you look at the fine print, the way they write this book is, they interview students ... compile a transcript of the interviews (often messing things up along the way) ... send those transcripts to writers, who have limited understandings of each school, and who misunderstand the information in the transcripts - and that's what's in this book, the flawed writer's take.

Here are complaints that have run about this book in the past:
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The information in this book cannot be trusted to be accurate. For example, the write-up on Bryn Mawr claims that students there call themselves "Bryn Mawrians," when in fact Bryn Mawr students refer to themselves as "Mawrtyrs." Such evidence of sloppy research makes me wonder from where the writers get their information - and what else is just plain wrong.
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I bought this book, and I looked at what the book said about my college (Pitzer) and everything you could pick off the website they got right. But as one has said before me, they get A LOT wrong. For example they say the school has two places students can eat, mentioning a place called "The Gold Mine," they mention this place a number of times, yet it does not exist. They talk about "nick names" that everyone calls the dorm buildings, nicknames that I have NEVER heard. Another example is the big fair that Pitzer has each year, there is a very strange story behind how the fair started. If they asked anyone on campus about the fair, they would could tell them the story. Yet the book says its a fair celebrating the coming of spring. Why would a college located in southern CA, with warm weather year round have a fair celebrating the coming of warm weather in the rest of the country? Yale kids are smarter then that? Arn't they? I gave a three star rating because general information is put in the same place. But there are a lot better books out there. So unless your just skimming the book while your in a book store, steer clear of this one.
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This book is horrible. They don't interview any students, they haven't for over 15 years. I'd stay away from this book, it will give you false hope and ruin your college experience. The publisher should stop running press on this garbarge. It's the SAME EXACT BOOK every single year, they just update the cover. Give it a rest!
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So, according to this guide every school must be either...
a) A "party school" where the students are inebriated a greater percentage of the time than they spend in class. It turns out that the tuition and board at these schools are merely cover charges for the four years of parties and jam-band concerts. Chances are you'll miss the majority of your classes due to hangovers, so don't even bother with the academics
or
b) A "nerd school" where the social life is defined by the number of people in your study group. Forget parties and fun at these schools kids, it's off to the library...Did we mention the lackluster "male to female ratio"...funny, considering they mention that for an all-male school...
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Overall - this is not a very helpful book to use while choosing colleges. I wouldn't recommend it.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend the Insider's Guide to the Colleges to either parents or students. I feel that Fiske, Princeton Review and Kaplan (even though the last edition is becoming dated) are better sources of information.

However, there are some good aspects to the Insider's Guide so I would at least recommend picking up the book at the library and skimming the beginning section on choosing a college. Insider's does a good job of mentioning all the facets a student should consider and they do a very fair job of detailing the strengths and weaknesses of both small and large schools.

On the other hand, I have to agree with the reviewer who said that the entries make each school sound like either a "party school" or a "nerd school" as if colleges only came in two varieties. I think it quickly becomes very hard to distinguish individual qualities of the schools because so much emphasis is placed on the balance of partying to studying to the exclusion of other information, particularly about good academic reasons to attend a school. It's also apparent that Insider's is placing a little too much emphasis on sports when they discuss a school's croquet or handball program. Yep, that makes the school different, but it should be obvious to Insider's that there are other aspects of the school they should have focused on instead.

Now my writing is not the best, but I suppose I expected better from Yale students. One writer used the non-existent word "irregardless" (it's "regardless") while another couldn't be bothered to check if Stony Brook was one word or two. The writers sometimes delivered badly executed last paragraphs with incongruous sentences, poor transitions and confusing conclusions. You end up with something like "Students at X University say that the food is horrific, the dorms should be condemned and the school is less exciting than a cemetery. It's a great place to spend four years." Yes, I suppose it would be fair to give them a break since they're only undergraduates (I think), but I feel it's important to expose our high school kids to the superior writing found in other guides like Fiske or Princeton Review instead of something that's not very good.

This brings me to the Insider's Guide's assertion that the book is "funny and incredibly entertaining." While this is subjective, I strongly disagree. The Insider's Guide is fairly boring compared to the much wittier Princeton Review guide. Personally, my favorite is Fiske, but I would say that if a parent is having trouble getting her teenager to start looking at colleges seriously, she'd pick up something besides Fiske, and I suspect it's often the Insider's Guide as it's written by "students for students." However, not only is Princeton Review better written, the format of the Insider's Guide is user-surly with small print and cramped, unattractive pages. I will say that the Insider's Guide does a better job of sticking to factual statistics than giving schools subjective ratings on a four-star scale, and some may prefer that. As a matter of fact, the Insider's Guide does have a few statistics that Princeton Review neglects and two of them are important: The freshman retention rate and the graduation rate. Both statistics are fairly good indicators of how happy students are at their respective schools. So if those stats are important to you, that might be one reason to at least browse through the Insider's Guide.

The Insider's Guide inexplicably leaves out some top-notch schools, particularly in Texas and Louisiana (such as Loyola) while including some rather absurd choices that have SAT means in the low 400's or in one case, 300's. They also have a number of large state schools that I don't feel have any place in a guide to the "top schools." The fact is that they attract a multitude of applicants which means more people will buy this book. I wouldn't suggest removing the schools with very unimpressive statistics if there are sufficient reasons to keep them (in many cases, I couldn't find any), but with some incomprehensible exclusions, I can't say I find the book authoritative or comprehensive. Go with Fiske or, if your student isn't excited about researching colleges, go with Princeton Review.

I feel this guide is sometimes useful, but inconsistent. The entries will often tell about the party situation on campus, and perhaps how good the dorms or the food are, and sometimes that's good enough to tell you that you don't want to attend certain schools. But often they say little about the reasons you're in college at the first place: What you're trying to learn. Academics are often overlooked in this guide, although entries on science-oriented schools like Georgia Tech are exceptions. They might list one or two favorite courses at each school, but in general the book misses the bigger picture about programs or opportunities.

I think the book has a bit of a Northeastern bias as their coverage in other regions isn't as thorough. They missed essential schools to a guidebook to the top schools such as Southwestern University and Austin College. There are about ten to fifteen schools that are listed in all the other guidebooks, like Elon University, The College of Charleston and Illinois Institute of Technology and others, mostly in the South and West, that are missing from this book. They do state that because of limited space, they couldn't list all the top schools, but there are a number of odd choices that they probably shouldn't have included if space was a problem. It's all a matter of opinion, and perhaps it would normally serve the public to feature schools that none of the other guides do, but without mentioning specific names, some of the schools they list would interest many fewer people on a national level than the ones they missed.

This guide says things about financial aid in their section about private vs. public schools that I feel is misinformation. They say that small private schools don't have the money to cover financial aid very well, so it's better to stick with "cheaper" public schools. That's not true in many cases. Small schools like Grinnell, Southwestern, and Amherst are very wealthy, and there are probably seventy to a hundred leading small schools that are more than financially sound and generous with aid. Meanwhile, federal money for public schools has been drying up over the last several years, so there is sometimes a shortfall at the financial aid office leaving students with a gap of unmet need. It's important to apply to both private and public schools because you won't know which will be the best bet financially until you actually see and compare the offers.

Furthermore, they seem to indicate that only bigger, top-tier private institutions have "need-blind" admissions, and that if a school has a need-blind policy, you can be sure that its financial aid package will be good enough for you to attend. Nope. First, many smaller schools have need blind admissions, and secondly, you can still receive a package from a need-blind school that consists mostly of loans, making the school unaffordable. The best explanation of financial aid I've seen is in the book called The Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College.

The Insider's Guide does a pretty good job with statistics as they offer more figures than the other guides including more information than Fiske Guide to Colleges (not the same book as the one mentioned above) on fraternity percentages, religious affiliation, minority percentages, and tuition and room & board amounts. To be fair to Fiske, information on religious leanings and fraternity information can almost always be found in the body of each profile, but you'll need to get tuition figures from somewhere else like the school websites.

I don't think Insider's Guide is better for students even though it's written by students, but it is three or four dollars cheaper than the other guides. Because the book has smaller dimensions, the print is also much smaller and, therefore, very irritating to read, and the writing isn't engaging enough to make up for it. On the other hand, it fits better in a backpack.

CollegePlanGuy@aol.com
Volunteer Counselor

This was an OK guide to some colleges. Unfortunately, some of the schools my son is considering weren't in the book which was dissapointing. The infomation about the schools wasn't as in depth or "insider" as I had hoped. I found college sites on the web more helpful. I wouldn't have bought this book if I had known.

I'm a student at Williams College and I previewed what the book said about my school, through the "Look inside the book feature." This book says Williams has 1,200 undergrads which is completely wrong. We have about 2,100 undergrads. Being 75% off about a school's size is not good. I dont know if there are other factual errors but based on the Williams entry, I would assume so.

The real advantage to this guide, like The Best 361 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.

This is a great reference guide for parents and more importantly students. The book provided the much needed statistics on admission requirements, majors, fees, profile of student body and several additional valuable points of interest. The comprehensive description of the campus, including the best and worst of what the school has to offer was quite informative and I think provided a clear picture of what a prospective student could expect to experience. This is a must read for students and parents. I felt as if I could have been walking on campus.

This can be a useful volume for those who do not wish wide coverage of colleges and universities throughout the United States. A lot of good schools are missing, though. For instance, I went to Bradley University as an undergraduate, and it does not show up in the listing of Illinois schools, even though it has a pretty good reputation for quality. The number of Illinois' colleges represented is a pretty small slice of decent schools available there.

Just so, Pennsylvania. Many good schools are simply not covered. The introduction that explains how colleges are selected is rather vague--and not very convincing.

All of that said, the discussion of those colleges covered isn't bad. There is enough discussion and information to begin to distinguish one school from another. Thus, this is a useful resource, but it is compromised by spotty coverage of some fine institutions in the United States.

...there is no denying there are errors in this book. My friend's daughter is searching for a college, and after reading my alma mater's entry - I told her to look elsewhere for her information. Signed - a "Mawrtyr" - class of '90.

Gives a true perspective of campus life from a student's point of view.

BUY IT TODAY!!! (or the 2007 version)