<p>We have the Fiske and Princeton Review books for this year. Should we buy the new ones this summer?</p>
<p>I bought new ones for D#2, mainly because I didn’t want her to think her college search was somehow less important than her older sister’s. Differences were minimal for the ten or twelve colleges I compared.</p>
<p>They publish “new” editions every year, but it’s not worth it to buy newer editions if you have last year’s editions. The content pretty much remains the same.</p>
<p>I have two consecutive editions of PR’s book that I got for free at a promotional event, and it looks like they’re updated through a cycle. The profiles of each school are updated every few years.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t buy a new one if the copy you have has been published in the last 3 years. They very rarely put much “new” in it other than updating stats, and you can get the stats online. A better investment would be to broaden your collection by adding some different guide book from a different author or publisher. Since you have 2 “traditional” books you might want to mix things up by trying a guidebook that gives a different take on things --such as “Colleges that Change Lives” or “Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League” — or getting a book that is geared more particularly to your kid’s interests.</p>
<p>^^that’s a good idea!</p>
<p>Here’s a list of some of the books: </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/5117504-post8.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/5117504-post8.html</a></p>
<p>The stats in the guidebook are often around two years out of date(for the entering class from two years before the date on the cover) anyway, so you can use the books for general info and go online (common data sets, school newspapers, school website) to get the most current and up to date info. Sometime stats (and policies) change from year to year, so it’s a good thing to check even if you have the most current edition of the guides.</p>
<p>This is the subject of another FAQ (which I have to update from time to time because it refers to dates in its text): </p>
<p>CURRENCY OF COMMON DATA SET INFORMATION </p>
<p>Each school year the colleges officially count their new freshman class AFTER the school year begins. (One college admission officer told me near the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year that his college counts on the tenth day of class in the new school year, which I think is industry-standard practice. Whatever the date, usually each college does this on the same date each year.) Sometime around the turn of the calendar year (that is, in January during the school year) a college’s figures for that freshman class begin to be posted on the College Board website, and possibly on the college’s own website in the form of a Common Data Set filing. So what you see early in the school year on the College Board descriptions of colleges is mostly information about the entering freshman class that entered in fall of the PREVIOUS school year (for example, information about new enrolled college students from high school class of 2008 is available to applicants in fall of 2009). That is the MOST RECENT information you have to go on as you apply for colleges yourself in fall of 2009, as a member of high school class of 2009. It is always like this–there is always a built-in lag between the year you can look up and the year you are living in as a student. Sometimes colleges post press releases right after they admit a new class in the spring, but those press releases are not comparable from college to college in the way that Common Data Set information is.</p>
<p>Little secret of the publishing industry for you… people won’t buy the new editions of these books if they don’t think that the info changes every year. The truth… (obviously) the info doesn’t change much from year to year.</p>
<p>Nobody would care about these ranking publications either if the press release said “as expected, it’s basically the same as last year.”</p>
<p>So if you already have a guide from the last few years, don’t waste money on a new one.</p>