Customer Reviews

Kaplan College Guide 2009 Edition (Kaplan College Guides)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This guide is not bad, but if you're looking for a guide that will give you thorough descriptions of the top colleges, this is definitely not it. Kaplan used to have a guide similar to Fiske or Princeton Review, but they've changed their area of coverage. Now the book is much more useful as a guide to majors and career paths, and this particular edition discusses the importance of "green" eco-employment. However, the guide takes the environmentalism too far. Yes, it's extremely important, but that can't be the only factor when choosing a college, and they spend pages and pages on a very small number (25) of "green" schools, and then give very short, unhelpful capsules about 365 other institutions. This frustrating section runs a 198 pages including the section on the green schools. It probably would have been much better to have page-long profiles on 198 (or so) schools that include a bit on each college's environmentalist efforts or lack thereof.

Another problem with the book is that useful information is scattered haphazardly in the midst of the college capsules. Interested in schools that are strong in finance or business? They list a few top schools such as NYU and Dartmouth on page 155 - the page for the Universities of Iowa and Kansas. You saw a similar short list of schools that were great with financial aid but you don't remember what page it was on? Good luck finding it again. These lists should have been collected in one separate section.

On the other hand, the back section has a long series of in-depth interviews with professionals in a wide variety of fields. The answers aren't always perfect (for example, when asked "what schools are the strongest in major X" at least one person said "I don't know") but they are very good. Overall they will give students an excellent idea of what is entailed in each line of work. Really, with the current cost of college, students probably should know now whether their career plans are likely to require graduate school, and these interviews can help. Here, the book's emphasis on environmental careers should be very much appreciated as it explains the path to careers that are both likely to be widely available in the future as well as highly needed.

Overall I wouldn't use this as a guide to colleges to replace Fiske or Princeton Review, but I do think the book is worth looking at to see if the careers you (or your child) are interested in are discussed because the interviews are helpful and informative, especially if environmentalism is a turn-on.

From the title, I expected more of a guide to most of the American colleges, not just those colleges that fit into selected categories.