Fiske Guide to Colleges 2005 (Fiske Guide to College)

Rating:
Summary: The Best I've Seen
Review: I think Fiske is the most useful of the college guides. It tells the most about each college's academic strengths, and it explains to parents who may have gone to the school twenty or more years ago how the school has changed. Most of the sidebar statistics are very helpful. Fiske rates academics, social opportunities and overall quality of life on a 1 to 5 scale. A lot of people are looking very closely at freshman retention and graduation rates these days, and Fiske provides those numbers as well.

I don't feel Fiske does an adequate enough job with each schools expense. It rates schools on a 1 to 4 dollar sign scale which I feel can be misleading because a school's price tag doesn't often equal the amount a student will have to spend if a school has a lot of financial aid available. There are times when students actually end up with more debt from public schools.

Except for finances, I think Fiske is better than Princeton Review in every regard. It does a better job detailing a school's strongest majors and describing which schools overlap the ones you are considering. Princeton Review uses a system where they tell you which schools are "often preferred" to the school you're looking at or which schools are "rarely preferred." That would be interesting if it wasn't so subjective and inconsistent.

Compared to Peterson's, Kaplan and Princeton Review, Fiske is the most exclusive as it states it restricts its list to the top 10% of colleges. So on the one hand there are fewer schools to choose from, and on the other you know that the listed institutions are respected enough to get the Fiske seal of approval. (Barron's Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges has even fewer schools, but I feel that book is not very useful in that it offers too few schools and each entry is written by an alumnus of that school.)

Fiske does give a fair amount of student opinion and covers subjects such as Greek life, athletics, and general atmosphere quite adequately. While it may skew a bit to the positive, I think this can be an asset as it will help make students excited about college.


Rating:
Summary: Wouldn't Counsel without it!
Review: As a high school guidance director/counselor in a college-prep HS, I use and refer students/parents to a variety of sources for information on colleges, especially views on the characteristics, "climate," and culture that they just can't get from data-heavy guide books. Fiske's provides well-written summaries with just the right amount of detail of what life is like on each campus. Entries are updated annually from reports submitted by a wide-range of observers and critics who visit and tour these campuses throughout the year. Fiske's Guide is essential for students who cannot visit on their own and provides a great "reality check" as they start narrowing down their "list."

Rating:
Summary: Accurate - helpful
Review: If nothing else, this guide serves to provide an alternative to the Princeton Review. While no single book can explain all there is to know about a single school or admissions process, this guide does an admirable job describing the highs and lows of each school, its personality and some of the processes one would have to go though to get into such a school. Overall one of if not the single best guides out there.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Positive Look at Colleges
Review: While yes, the Fiske Guide to Colleges (2005) is sometimes absurdly rose-tinted and glossy, it nevertheless provides the reader with a shrewd sense of the ambience of each campus.

One of the best things about this guide is the sheer bulk of commentary about each insitute of higher learning. I believe the book states it provides from 1000 to 2500 words on each school, an adequate amount to give any high school student an idea of what schools he or she should look into.

One does get the sense, however, that the writing is something like either a reverent, wide-eyed student of that college would write, or heavily proofread by the schools themselves.

Don't let that deter you, however. There is good information to be found therein.