<p>This might not be the best place to post this, but I was wondering what are some of your favorite/least favorite college guide books(To clarify, I am talking about Fiske, Princeton Review, etc, not publications put out by colleges)</p>
<p>I have always been a fan of the Fiske guides, as well as the US News publication. By far, by far the worst I have seen is "Choosing the Right College", which I think is put out by ISI. It is so fundamentaly biased that it seriously borders on being racist/sexist/homophobic/bigoted in general. Any school that offers classes that focus on non-Western cultures is seen as "pandering to liberals", and nearly every good LAC(with the exception of schools such as Claremont Mckenna) get labeled as bastions of communism and homosexuality.</p>
<p>It's almost funny how blatently politcally incorrect it is, not to mention poorly written.</p>
<p>What are your opinions on the best and worst college books?</p>
<p>I was in Border's yesterday and realized that no one can even hope to have a grasp of the whole spectrum of college guide books--there must be at least 50 on the shelves of Border's alone. That said, I think that Fiske is the among the best--it's well written; seems to make some effort at periodic updates; and the opening 2-3 sentence summaries are often masterpieces of distilling things to their essence. USNews (on-line is more complete than the hard copy) is probably the best I've seen for sheer data.</p>
<p>The little summaries are an essential addition to the Fiske guide. When my sister was applying to schools(in 2002), she had the Fiske 2001 guide, and they didn't have the summaries. Looking back to those, compared to the current one that I have, the new one seems so, so much more helpful.</p>
<p>I have to agree with the other posters. Fiske is definitely my college resource of choice. The "If You Apply To" blurbs at the end are definitely not bad to have, either; easier and faster than digging around the PR website or the college website for deadline dates, at least :)</p>
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It's really dumb how CC will delete words that are names of their competitor's sites.
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Yes, especially when CC uses their "rankings</a>." :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I agree that Fiske is the best (I met Edward Fiske when he visited Duke :cool:). The Yale guide isn't bad, and Colleges That Change Lives is a great resource.</p>
<p>The ones I found most helpful were Getting In by Katherine Cohen and Students' Guide to Colleges: The Definitive Guide to America's Top 100 Schools Written by the Real Experts--the Students Who Attend Them by Jordan Goldman. The latter helps especially with the "Why University X?" essays.</p>
<p>The A is for Admission guide by Michelle Hernandez was alright.</p>
<p>Are kidding about the "Choosing the Right College", the ISI Guide? It is the only one I've seen that provides meanginful information worth paying for!</p>
<p>That guide is AMAZING. Is it "biased" in a conservative leaning way. Well duh! It's put out by ISI!!! But what are the conservative "biases" on higher education? Well 1) Schools should have a "core curriculum" that covers American history, classical literature, etc. because these are topics that EVERY educated American should have a working knowledge of. Two people who gradaute from the same school with the same major should taken at least some of the sames classes or least covered some of the same material2) You CANNOT study and understand other cultures without knowing about our own Western culture 3) Fluff areas like Gender Studies, Multicultural Studies, and basically anything ending in studies are more often places for professors to indoctrinate students into their Marxist and/or feminist viewpoints rather than actually teach something meaningful 4) Bias against conservative viewpoints in modern schools is rampant </p>
<p>Given this, if you are a conservative or moderate or libertarian, someone who doesn't like to have propaganda shoved down your throat, or you actually want to learn something in college beyong how to perform a job, this book is priceless.</p>