Making a Difference: College and Graduate Guide

Rating:
Summary: distinctive colleges, distinctive education, unusual, great
Review: I wrote this guide for those of you out there who want to use your education to make a better world. The book features lots of unusual colleges and hard to find graduate programs - filled with hands-on experiential education, community-based learning, meaningful, relevant, career-oriented majors and more. You'll never learn about most of these colleges from your counselor or other guides. Do you want to go to an alternative college? THey're all here. A green college? A college concerned with peace or social justice? Little colleges on islands or innovative state colleges? These places offer exciting educational opportunities, a supportive atmosphere for someone who wants to make a difference. Most of them are friendly places for minority and gay students. Lots of outdoor based recreation too. Parents, these are just great colleges. Many of them are small, and so very good places to send your B or C students. These are character building places, with value-based education. There are Buddhist, Catholic, Presbyterian and other religiously affiliated colleges. Looking for a graduate program? This book includes programs from environmental law to community based medicine, non-profit management to sustainable development. It also lists the Peace Corps Masters Internationalist Programs. Introductory essays from Jeremy Rifkin, AmeriCorps, Marty Nemko (Cool Careers for Dummies) David Orr and more.

Rating:
Summary: A very unique college guide for liberals and conservatives
Review: This is a book for junior activists! It lists many, many undergraduate and graduate schools that are strong in social activism. This book is a first-of-its-kind. There is no other college guide like this one, except maybe "Lisa Birnbach's New and Improved College Book" by Lisa Birnbach. Besides these two, there are no other guide books out on the market that tell the prospective college students and their parents about the political leaning and activism atmosphere of the colleges and universities.

Selecting a college is very much like finding a marriage partner. It takes a lot of effort to find a right match. Too often, students and parents are attracted to the selectivity and rankings put out by US News & World Report, thinking that these numbers mean academic excellence. No, they are not. Selectivity means how good the students are at a particular school. It doesn't mean that the school teaches well. It just means that the students are good. There is no ranking of how well the professors teach. US News & World Report never has such a ranking. Nor is there a ranking of how well the graduates of a particular college or university perform on job after they leave the school. Such a ranking would be the most useful, for it reveals the real and genuine transformation work that a school has done for the students. But no, US News & World Report does not have such a ranking.

This book offers a very unique view into the colleges not seen in other guide books -- which ones are socially and politically active and are doing their best to cultivate activists for social change?

This book is useful to both liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative students and parents can use this guide to avoid the schools listed here. Liberal students and parents can use it to look into and apply to these schools.

Not all schools listed in this guide are of the same degrees or in the same areas of activism. Indeed, some schools are very active and some are very mild in their activism. Also, different schools are active in different areas.

There are two reasons why I give it 4 stars. One is that I think the grammar and the writing style can be better. Another is that I suspect that some schools are not listed. For example, the famous UC Berkeley is not, nor is Macalester College.