<p>Has anyone bought the book? Is it worth it opposed to the online version? How accurate is their info?</p>
<p>It's exactly the same information as can be found online. I would say it's a better idea to either buy a copy of Fiske for comparison OR spend the money on a subscription to US News & World Reports online premium version of their college ranking reports. Those break down admissions statistics into much more meaningful information.</p>
<p>I bought the book and I like it. I flagged a lot of the pages for my S, who isn't very interested in going through the big books.....</p>
<p>I like Fiske's Guide a lot better than P.Review. They have campus info., popular courses, where else students who are applying to that may be applying to Wesleyan for example. And stars for academics, quality of life etc.</p>
<p>I think they are both helpful in getting a balanced view of a school. At $25 os so it seems silly not to spend the money and have the entire book handy.</p>
<p>Just know that they definitely aren't updated every year as they claim.</p>
<p>No but things don't change that much either. PR does a better job of getting the new stats in the book. The Yale Guide is really inept in the stats area.</p>
<p>Chocoholic, PR has the same info.</p>
<p>Fiske never seems to say anything negative, written by an optimist who only sees the good I guess.</p>
<p>Why the number 357?</p>
<p>357 different colleges, I believe.</p>
<p>Toblin, it's been a creeping numbers thing from year to year...best 331, 345, 351, 357...do I hear 400?</p>
<p>Arizonamom, I agree. And I don't want to hear just the positive.</p>
<p>I definitely want to hear the negative too - good to know.</p>
<p>Also, the book has every colleges ranking for each of the categories 1-357 right, opposed to only the top and bottom 20? Also, are there more categories than they show online?</p>
<p>Odan, other than the Top 20 in each category--Best Dorms, Most Accesible Profs, Most Conservative, etc.--the book is rankings free, which I applaud. It gives sub-rankings in each of four categories--Selectivity, Academics, Campus Life, Financial Aid--but I think that trying to nail any of these on a precise 1-100 scale is a fool's errand. For each school it generally has things like both average and interquartile SAT scores, percentage in the top 10/25/50 percent of their high school class, average class and lab sizes, percentage of male/female, percentage of black/Hispanic/Asian/international, percentage of applicants accepted, percentage of acceptees attending and a little bit of what schools applicants often prefer to a given school, sometimes prefer to a given school, and rarely prefer to a given school. One longish paragraph each on Academics, Life, and Student Body; shorter paragraphs on Admissions, FinAid, and "The Inside Word."</p>
<p>For the Top/Bottom 20 stuff, they have something like 63 categories plus two special categories. Again, I don't take any of this stuff with too much precision but it gives some idea of issues to examine when visiting, talking to students, etc. And here I'll give a commercial for Smith (2003/2004 editions): Students Never Stop Studying #9, Professors Bring Materials to Life #14, Great College Libraries #10, Dissatisfied with Financial Aid #12, Happy Students #15, Beautiful Campus #9, Great Food #15, Dorms Like Palaces #2, Best Quality of Life #20, Most Nostalgic for Bill Clinton #1, MostPolitically Active #15, Gay Community Accepted #4, Great College Theater #12, Dodge Ball School (composite low intercollegiate & intramural sports, Greek life, theater, cigarette usage) #14, Birkenstock-Wearing Tree-Hugging Clove-Smoking Vegetarians (composite of political, drug usage, prevelance of religion,popularity of student government, acceptance of gay community) #7.</p>
<p>The ratings for a given school can bounce around from year to year but the gestalt gives you a fairly adequate flavor of the school.</p>
<p>its handy for quick facts like acceptance rate, average sat scores, etc., but you'll probably want to ignore any of the data that they created, i.e. "Selectivity Rate" where virtually almost every school gets a very selective rating. the descriptions are somewhat accurate, but it shouldnt be representative of the campus itself. </p>
<p>overall i find it very handy and organized and useful if you use the correct data... i still keep a copy of it near me.</p>
<p>Kfc4u, their online thing apparently has a Selectivity glitch but the book doesn't, with ratings ranging from 72 to 99 on my quick flip through. Harvard, Yale, Amherst at 99, U of Chicago at 96, UCLA at 94, Kenyon at 92, Texas A&M at 83, CUNY at 75 and lots of stuff in between. It's scaled pretty accurately, imo...to the point where a point or three's difference isn't significant, which is realistic.</p>
<p>IMHO, which is not H at all, the Princeton Review is good toilet reading material! I agree that Fiske is far more accurate.</p>
<p>Get thee to a Library ----read them all and then go buy the
one(s) your found most useful. After you start to create a list search news articles (college, local and national), police reports, environmental studies....whatever you have time for. (Did you know part of one woman's college is built over a toxic waste site? It apparently has been cleaned up)</p>
<p>357 Colleges is a nice book. I like reading books more than reading computer screens.</p>
<p>Alexandre, I disagree about Fiske. It's not as bad as Peterson's--which lets colleges review and edit the material therein--but its positive-only tone is unbalanced and you would seldom have a clue about problems that may or may not be important to you from reading it.</p>