<p>I personally like reading reviews of schools, and especially so if they’re negative. I find that it can be really tough to ascertain what a school’s culture and academics can be like; the colleges themselves will always make everything sound amazing, and a lot of the people who are happy with the school tend to give blanket “I love it here, everything’s amazing” without going into specific details. Complaints can sometimes be overly broad, too, but I find that some can be very specific in nature and thereby pretty telling about the school.</p>
<p>Negative reviews aren’t always necessarily negative for everyone, incidentally. Take this, for example. My sister goes to UVM and hates it because she thinks it’s overly liberal and the kids too alternative and hippie for her tastes. Negative opinion, right? Not necessarily–I can think of a ton of kids who are hippie-ish who would think her very complaints were actually really positive aspects of the school. If they hadn’t know anything about UVM before, by reading a review she might post, they might learn through her complaints that UVM would be a good fit for them.</p>
<p>Of course, as has already been mentioned, you do have to take some reviews with a grain of salt. I remember I read one review of NYU by a disgruntled student once who complained, among other things, that parking was impossible to find. Err… parking. In NYC. Was the kid expecting to find oodles and oodles of free parking spaces in NYC for free or something? And moreover, why is it even NYU’s fault in the first place that NYC’s parking is bad? I kind of had to laugh at that one.</p>