<p>Can anybody give me some really strong research resources for colleges? I have books such as Princeton Review and U.S. News best colleges, but the only thing that they really show are facts and figures. What I'm really interested in is something that will show me what schools are exceptionally strong in what fields, what programs they offer etc.<br>
Anyone know of good books, websites, or anything that will help me answer some questions beyond numbers? Thanks.</p>
<p>US News has undergraduate rankings for engineering and business.</p>
<p>RKATC, PR's site does give the top majors in each college. You can also go to collegeboard.com. They have similar information, but slightly different. There are quite a few books out there: PR's, US News, as elizabeth mentioned. Also try The Fiske Guide and Yale's Insider. Once you find a few that look interesting, I highly recommend you go to their websites! You can get so much from them!! From pictures & dimensions of their dorms, to pictures of their libraries, their majors/minors, courses! They have stats on their faculty including sometimes interesting info on their professors... even their personal interests (which I find interesting). Their school newspapers are often on-line so you can get a feel for what the students body is into.
Good luck... it can be addicting!</p>
<p>Fiske Guide and Yale's Insider are good places to start. A number of schools also host livejournal threads where prospective students can pose questions. From my examination, it appears to me that the answers are straight forward and honest, not canned responses from the administration.</p>
<p>Collgeboard.com will give you the breakdown of the most popular majors.</p>
<p>Two books that I highly recommend are:
Rugg's Recommendations of the Colleges - lists various majors and then schools of ALL selectivity levels that have strong programs in those areas</p>
<p>The College Finder by Steven Antonoff - Has lists of majors and schools as well - not as extensive as Rugg's but drawn from various sources. </p>
<p>Both are available through Amazon.</p>
<p>Neither is a book of "rankings" - just a good starting point for tracking down leads on possible schools. As always, do your own follow up research on individual schools.</p>
<p>Thanks!!!!</p>
<p>There is a service where kids from a school rate the school. You get a lot of comments from actual students and rating from students that are in current attendance. Go to <a href="http://www.collegeprowler.com">www.collegeprowler.com</a>. They list about 200 schools and are always adding new ones.</p>
<p>try checking out barron's</p>
<p>The limitation with collegeprowler is that they don't tell you how many students have participated in their "survey" --- is it one, two, a thousand? Without knowing this, you have no way of knowing if that's the way most students feel about a school or just a few. It can be a useful snapshot but take it with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Yes, College Prowler does have its limitiations in that the ratings are not statisticly valid. However, there do interview a fair number of people at each school based on the quotes that they get and are increasing their interviews for each school over what they did in prior edition. It is a service that you should at least check out. Some of the quotes may present questions for you to ask the school.</p>
<p>A website you might want to check out is <a href="http://www.studentsreview.com%5B/url%5D">www.studentsreview.com</a>
It has some pretty good information.</p>
<p>I also like to do an interests search for the college's name on livejournal.com - you can find out some interesting stuff that way if there's a live journal interest group.</p>
<p>And, the reviews at <a href="http://www.eopinions.com%5B/url%5D">www.eopinions.com</a> on different colleges can sometimes be great (unfortunately, most are getting a little old now - but still good info.)</p>
<p>I also like to read the archives of the student newspaper - most are online. Here's one link for finding them (or do a search at each school web site for student newspaper)
<a href="http://newslink.org/statcamp.html%5B/url%5D">http://newslink.org/statcamp.html</a></p>
<p>I like Taxguy's suggestion to use all of this info. as a way to find questions to ask the school itself.</p>