Rating: 
Summary: A self-serving rant....
Review: ....this book merely elevates the hype surrounding the college admisisons process. The book not only contanins inaccurate facts and misinformation, but also the spirit of the book leads students and families to adopt an attitude of cynicism towards the college admisisons process, an approach that can be foolhardy when college admisisons officers seek genuine students who are enthusiastic about their educations and their futures.The book has a point, however. It reminds us how much of an advantage the rich -- with private counselors, fancy SAT prep courses, and access to people in power -- have in the world of college admisisons. Could the time reading this book have been better spent wrting essays, visiting colleges, or simply enjoying life? Absolutely.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking and very helpful.
Review: Allen knows more about the admissions game than most. As a college advisor at a top New England prep school, I can attest that his advice is at least as good as the advice we give, and in many cases is more detailed and insightful. This is the book I recommend to parents when they have hard questions. Many people inside the college admissions world do not like this book--largely because Allen reveals the bare details of the game and exposes the many flaws and frauds within. If you have a very good college counselor, then you probably do not need this book. Otherwise, do not start the admissions process without first consulting this book--it will enlighten you and certainly give you an advantage.
Rating: 
Summary: Not really secrets.....
Review: and in no small part, not fully accurate. The author "borrows" liberally from elsewhere*, and much of what is original is flawed. He has a strong dislike of Harvard and Princeton and this is overly obvious all too often. Also, suggestions such as not applying to colleges that "stoop" to asking you whether you had help in preparing your essay (such as Duke) are self-serving; in this instance, the author knows the colleges are checking not to see if the work has been reviewed by parents, teachers or friends (which they assume it has been), but rather to see whether you have hired a "professional college counselor" to do your work for you (the author is one of these). We've been though the Ivy League process successfully (at one of those schools this fellow doesn't appear to like) and are preparing to go through it with our 2nd child this fall. The book then was bought on the off chance that some hidden pearl would be worth the price of admission. Instead, I suggest the original (*) "A is for Admission", written by someone who has actually been on the AdComm at an Ivy.
Rating:
Summary: Not really secrets.....
Review: and in no small part, not fully accurate. The author "borrows" liberally from elsewhere*, and much of what is original is flawed. He has a strong dislike of Harvard and Princeton and this is overly obvious all too often. Also, suggestions such as not applying to colleges that "stoop" to asking you whether you had help in preparing your essay (such as Duke) are self-serving; in this instance, the author knows the colleges are checking not to see if the work has been reviewed by parents, teachers or friends (which they assume it has been), but rather to see whether you have hired a "professional college counselor" to do your work for you (the author is one of these). We've been though the Ivy League process successfully (at one of those schools this fellow doesn't appear to like) and are preparing to go through it with our 2nd child this fall. The book then was bought on the off chance that some hidden pearl would be worth the price of admission. Instead, I suggest the original (*) "A is for Admission", written by someone who has actually been on the AdComm at an Ivy.
Rating: 
Summary: I'd get it out of the library
Review: College admission is an anxiety wrought, controversial process in which some students admittedly have an edge. Everyone wants an edge, right? This book purports to reveal the trade secrets of expensive, exclusive private couselors but there is nothing new here. Badly proofread, repetitive (how many times do we need to hear about teak wastebaskets?), not much about the merit scholarship game, no index, no bibliography. Lots of opinionated advice, some good but hardly original: "read as much as you can"; some absurd "buy this person (your counselor) gifts for the holidays and at the end of the school year"; some wrong (the math IIC is only expected of students applying to top technical colleges." Sure, there's some worthwhile information but you won't recognize it unless you're pretty knowledgeable already. Read Toor, Mayher (just ignore the numbers, competition has ratcheted everything up), Hernandez, something by Pope, and maybe Mitchell. Browse the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Atlantic Monthly (ED benefits colleges, not kids), the NY Times (admission isn't obviously predictable), the Wall St. Journal (oboe players may have an edge). Then read Allen, keeping in mind that this author thinks your kid will happily fill out college apps in 8th grade in order to discover his weaknesses in time to improve.
Rating:
Summary: INSIDER INFO!(And it's not boring.)
Review: Hey, I really had FUN reading this book. I started reading another admissions book, but was bored to death after 20 pages. But this book really kept my attention and I finished it in 2 months (probably the only 400+ page book I've finished). This book is written for students, which is why I think I found it very readable. (There are notes for parents, but the book is really aimed at high school students.) Anyway, there are some printing mistakes, but it would be SILLY to skip all the tips and insider secrets in this book because of those mistakes. (Besides, most college books have mistakes. Fiske's book says that New College-in Florida-got its name because it is new. I thought this sounded silly so I emailed the college's admissions office and sure enough, Fiske is wrong. So even the MIGHTY FISKE can be factually wrong. But I still use Fiske's book.) This book does shred a few colleges, and it's obvious that some people connected to those colleges might get annoyed. If you went to Harvard, Penn or Stanford, Allen will have some fun at your expense. But in most cases, I think he's right-his examples are VERY GOOD and really shed light on the way colleges work. I really found the tips useful-it was like having a friend in the admissions office!-and I liked the lists at the end. The sooner you read this book the better because a lot of the tips are really helpful for 9th and 10th graders-I'm in 11th grade and I wish I'd read this book 2 years ago. If you want a book that has a TON a good tips and isn't boring, this is it.
Rating:
Summary: Superb.
Review: I agree with most of the comments in the other reviews: this book is brilliant, brash and contains some editing errors. As for the errors, I'm not sure how they got through the editing phase, but one can easily ignore them. The information in this book is priceless; Allen comes across as a real insider revealing the secrets of the admissions process. Some of the information is so explosive I wouldn't be surprised if more than one college dean called Allen to complain about what was printed. And I'm sure Allen's analysis of the admissions game has perturbed many others; for example, he says that most high school counselors are unqualified and lack relevant experience and that most of the more experienced admissions officers aren't very intelligent and probably could not have been admitted to the college whose admissions office they now manage-but it's not just opinions, Allen also explains why this information is relevant when putting together your application. Better editing really could have helped this book, but as it is, it's still probably the best admissions book in print and well-worth the investment. The prose is lively, the advice is detailed and highly usable, and the insider information is astounding.
Rating:
Summary: An opinionated, self-contradictory, and hastily written book
Review: I bought this book with high hopes; after all, it wouldn't cost this much more than all the other books if it wasn't the best one, right? Wrong. From the beginning, this book is riddled with spelling and formatting mistakes. There were myriads of spelling mistakes that could have been caught with a simple spell-checker in this book; some examples include: "no5t", "officerr's", "would have accepted", and other similarly glaring errors. Ironically, the book's section on essay writing strongly exhorts college applicants to review their essays thoroughly; I wonder why Mr. Allen didn't follow his own advice for his own book. Even more disparaging, even though the author constantly derides college guidebooks for their mistakes, he himself couldn't avoid making those same glaringly errors. On page 101, for example, he refers to Georgia Tech as a private university; any basic research will immediately inform the researcher that Georgia Tech is part of the public University of Georgia system. Finally, I couldn't believe that the book spent 3 pages disparaging fine institutions such as MIT, Cal Tech, and Stanford. The author even asserts that students aren't educated in these universities, "they are trained." I really do not believe that it is professional to bring one's personal opinion on the merits of engineers and mathematicians into a book on college admissions. In conclusion, I found Mr. Allen's book to be very hastily written (with no proofreading), opinionated, hypocritical, and grossly inaccurate. I strong suggest that you spend your money on another book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Perspective Worth Exploring
Review: I have certainly not exhausted the scope of college literature on the market, nor do I believe this book to be a work of "great literature" that I would want critiqued and analyzed by future generations of children, however I feel compelled to say that, amongst the dreary reviews it has been given, Andrew Allen's book offers a real perspective on college admissions and a surplus of information the average individual (dare I say, average Ivy-League-Applicant) has not and does not consider when thinking about America's most famous football league. What does this book do? Ultimately, it seems to convey the cries of an author that has been gradually disillusioned throughout his career as an initially enthusiastic "educational consultant" in New York City. Page after page of hurriedly/anxiously written, typo-laden prose seems to slowly uncover the gargantuan heaps of "dirt" this man has encountered regarding his career and its various components towards the end of the 20th century. The average individual does not often consider the blatant grade inflation many of the US's "top" universities have previously allowed; the common man or woman on the street will, despite the cynicism of the reviews posted here, actually be a bit surprised if one were to explain to him or her that Brown University, for example, merely "drops" every letter grade below a B or pass/fail grade that is failing. This book's pervading theme, that the "industry" of American Undergraduate Universities is a heinously unregulated one, and that there are, indeed, certain "tricks" and "lies" that, once known, may actually contribute to increasing an applicant's odds of being successfully admitted does, to my mind, actually stand firm, clear, and - to a degree - poignant as I go back through this book time and time again. None of our sacred American Institutions, not the Princeton Review, Phillips Academy, the Intel Science Talent Search scholarship, nor even the almighty dollar can truly guarantee admission to any "elite" American Institution, and this book is no exception.
If you expect the world from this manuscript, you will be severely disappointed. If, however, you are wise enough to view the text for what it is, a dense compilation of rarely assessed views, standpoints, ideas, and information about the American College Admissions system and the work of a troubled author, you shall find it a most satisfying, rewarding, and ultimately fulfilling read.
Rating:
Summary: A Perspective Worth Considering
Review: I have certainly not exhausted the scope of college literature on the market, nor do I believe this book to be a work of "great literature" that I would want critiqued and analyzed by future generations of children, however I feel compelled to say that, amongst the dreary reviews it has been given, Andrew Allen's book offers a real perspective on college admissions and a surplus of information the average individual (dare I say, average Ivy-League-Applicant) has not and does not consider when thinking about America's most famous football league.
What does this book do? Ultimately, it seems to convey the cries of an author that has been gradually disillusioned throughout his career as an initially enthusiastic "educational consultant" in New York City. Page after page of hurriedly/anxiously written, typo-laden prose seems to slowly uncover the gargantuan heaps of "dirt" this man has encountered regarding his career and its various components towards the end of the 20th century.
The average individual does not often consider the blatant grade inflation many of the US's "top" universities have previously allowed; the common man or woman on the street will, despite the cynicism of the reviews posted here, actually be a bit surprised if one were to explain to him or her that Brown University, for example, merely "drops" every letter grade below a B or pass/fail grade that is failing.
This book's pervading theme, that the "industry" of American Undergraduate Universities is a heinously unregulated one, and that there are, indeed, certain "tricks" and "lies" that, once known, may actually contribute to increasing an applicant's odds of being successfully admitted does, to my mind, actually stand firm, clear, and - to a degree - poignant as I go back through this book time and time again.
None of our sacred American Institutions, not the Princeton Review, Phillips Academy, the Intel Science Talent Search scholarship, nor even the almighty dollar can truly guarantee admission to any "elite" American Institution, and this book is no exception.
If you expect the world from this manuscript, you will be severely disappointed. If, however, you are wise enough to view the text for what it is, a dense compilation of rarely assessed views, standpoints, ideas, and information about the American College Admissions system and the work of a troubled author, you shall find it a most satisfying, rewarding, and ultimately fulfilling read.
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