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<p>Living in the Balt suburbs, this made me :D.</p>
<p>PM me specifics, northeastmom? This is very much a case-by-case judgment. Some unknown schools are left out of college guides for good reason, and some are not. I agree with looking closely at retention, graduation, and residence numbers.</p>
<p>Justamomof4, could you clear out a message to make room for a PM from me? Thanks.</p>
<p>Keilexandra, I will send a PM to you.</p>
<p>It’s a strained analogy, but the various guides are kind of like cookbooks - so much of this ingredient, so much of that, and voila! Here’s your great college. Each guide uses a different recipe, though, so they end up with somewhat different results. While they tend to emphasize many of the same things, the degree of emphasis varies.</p>
<p>So what happens if YOUR emphasis differs from a guidebook’s? You end up with a different result. More importantly, what if aspects which you value are hard to quantify? They don’t get accounted for (at least directly) at all. It takes in-depth personal research to determine whether a school fits your criteria, and since people don’t have the time to do this until you’re down to X candidates, the various ranking systems try to do it for us. As much as I dislike how they’re used, USN&WR and their ilk are popular because they fill a need.</p>
<p>Are they the be-all-and-end-all? Of course not, but they’re a good starting point. It’s up to you to understand the assumptions and filter them through your own lens to find the many other places which might meet your needs. While it’s natural to want to quantify things to help with decisions, the reality is the differences are often so small that the inherent variability (i.e., your mileage may vary) will overwhelm any distinctions. Good schools go unrecognized because 1) their valuable traits don’t fit well into a formula; and 2) the supposed differences in quantifiable traits don’t necessarily measure what makes a place a good school, particularly at the individual level.</p>
<p>DougBetsy, I just looked and Roanoke is not in either Fiske or PR. Just so you know, I don’t have the most recent editions, so it is possible that Roanoke could be listed in one of the more recent guide books.</p>
<p>northeastmom: sorry 'bout that. send that pm!</p>
<p>^^No problem, thanks for clearing a space. I will send it.</p>
<p>Regarding U Rochester…they had been listed in the PR for years and the write-up was very good…they were even listed on the “Best Libraries” list…but for some reason UR stopped sending information/stats to them, and so, PR dropped them from the book (first they gave them a 60 rating - insufficient information)…they may be back now (?) and I have seen UR listed in the best northeastern schools. I believe that if a school refuses to send info, they are omitted in other guides as well because I have noticed good schools occasionally left out elsewhere.</p>
<p>A thread touching upon the basic theme of this is:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/370873-brag-about-your-lesser-known-school-35.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/370873-brag-about-your-lesser-known-school-35.html</a></p>
<p>You will see long lists of schools in that list, many of which may not be known by you as geographical vicinity tends to be the limitation for knowledge about lesser known schools.</p>
<p>If a kid wanted to major in explosives, probably the best place in the country would be New Mexico Tech in Socorro, NM. No, it’s not in ANY of the big book guides, but it really does have faculty with knowledge and skills in the art of blowing stuff up. </p>
<p>If a kid wanted to work with chimpanzees, then a great place to start would be Central Washington. Not a big school, but they have a chimp colony and a well regarded research program. Jane Goodall stops in occasionally. </p>
<p>So, yes. I would certainly encourage a student to look at the 3,500 colleges that are not in the top 400 guide books.</p>
<p>I know nothing of the PR, but Fiske leaves out a lot of decent schools…Loyola of Chicago, U of Mississippi, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Illinois State, Washington College, etc.</p>