Product Description

"The best college guide you can buy." —USA Today

The #1 bestselling college guide, from the top name in college admissions!

For more than 20 years, this leading guide to more than 330 colleges and universities has been an indispensable source of information for college-bound students and their parents. Hip, honest and straightforward, Fiske Guide to Colleges 2010 delivers an insider's look at the academic climates and the social and extracurricular scenes at the "best and most interesting" schools in the US, plus Canada and Great Britain. Includes:

• Fiske's exclusive academic, social, and quality-of-life ratings
• The 40+ schools that deliver the best education at the most reasonable costs
• Lists of each school's strongest majors and programs
• Candid tips from each school's current students
• A self-quiz to help students understand which college is right for them
• Vital information on how to apply
• "Overlap" listings to help students expand their options

FISKE: THE INDEPENDENT VOICE FOR STUDENTS AND PARENTS
Why do students, parents and high school counselors trust and recommend Edward B. Fiske and the Fiske Guide to Colleges more than any other guide? Quite simply, they're fiercely independent:

• An author in touch: The incredible write-ups for more than 330 schools come not from a corporation, but from the former education editor of the New York Times, one of the leading experts in college admissions.
• No hype from the colleges: The Fiske Guide accepts no consulting, advertising or other fees from colleges and has no outside consortium of colleges working on its behalf.
• Nothing to sell: There are no counseling, essay-writing, tutoring, consulting, or other services Fiske Guide is trying to sell; just great information about great schools.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2123 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 816 pages

Review
The guide is notable as much for its focus on each school's personality and quality of life as for its statistical data and admissions information. (AP column Financial Bookshelf )

About the Author
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Edward Fiske served for 17 years as education editor of the New York Times, where he realized that college-bound students and their families needed better information on which to base their educational choices. He is also the author of the Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SIZING YOURSELF UP
The college search is a game of matchmaking. You have interests and needs; the colleges have programs to meet those needs. If all goes according to plan, you'll find the right one and live happily ever after–-or at least for four years. It ought to be simple, but today's admissions process resembles a high-stakes obstacle course.

Many colleges are more interested in making a sale than they are in making a match. Under intense competitive pressure, many won't hesitate to sell you a bill of goods if they can get their hands on your tuition dollars. Guidance counselors generally mean well, but they are often under duress from principals and trustees to steer students toward prestigious schools regardless of whether the fit is right. Your friends won't be shy with advice on where to go, but their knowledge is generally limited to a small group of hot colleges that everyone is talking about. National publications rake in millions by playing on the public's fascination with rankings, but a close look at their criteria reveals distinctions without a difference.

Before you find yourself spinning headlong on this merry-go-round, take a step back. This is your life and your college career. What are you looking for in a college? Think hard and don't answer right away. Before you throw yourself and your life history on the mercy of college admissions officers, you need to take some time to objectively and honestly evaluate your needs, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. What do you have to offer a college? What can a college do for you? Unlike the high school selection process, which is usually predetermined by your parents' property lines, income level, or religious affiliation, picking a college isn't a procedure you can brush off on dear ol' Mom and Dad. You have to take some initiative. You're the best judge of how well each school fits your personal needs and academic goals.

We encourage you to view the college selection process as the first semester in your higher education. Life's transitions often call for extra energy and focus. The college search is no exception. For the first time, you'll be contemplating a life away from home that can unfold in any direction you choose. Visions of majors and careers will dance in your head as you sample various institutions of higher learning, each with hundreds of millions of dollars in academic resources; it is hard to imagine a better hands-on seminar in research and matchmaking than the college search. The main impact, however, will be measured by what you learn about yourself. Piqued by new worlds of learning and tested by the competition of the admissions process, you'll be pushed as never before to show your accomplishments, clarify your interests, and chart a course for the future. More than one parent has watched in amazement as an erstwhile teenager suddenly emerged as an adult during the course of a college tour. Be ready when your time comes.

DEVELOP YOUR CRITERIA
One strategy is to begin the search with a personal inventory of your own strengths and weaknesses and your "wish list" for a college. This method tends to work well for compulsive list-makers and other highly organized people. What sorts of things are you especially good at? Do you have a list of skills or interests that you would like to explore further? What sort of personality are you looking for in a college? Mainstream? Conservative? Offbeat?
What about extracurriculars? If you are really into riding horses, you might include a strong equestrian program in your criteria. The main problem won't be thinking of qualities to look for-you could probably name dozens-but rather figuring out what criteria should play a defining role in your search. Serious students should think carefully about the intellectual climate they are seeking. At some schools, students routinely stay up until 3:00 a.m. talking about topics like the value of deconstructing literary texts or the pros and cons of free trade.

These same students would be viewed as geeks or weirdos on less cosmopolitan campuses. Athletes should take a hard look at whether they really want to play college ball and, if so, whether they want to go for an athletic scholarship or play at the less-pressured Division III level. Either way, intercollegiate sports require a huge time commitment.

Young women have an opportunity all to themselves-the chance to study at a women's college. The Fiske Guide profiles a dozen such campuses, a vastly underappreciated resource on today's higher education scene. With small classes and strong encouragement from faculty, students at women's colleges move on to graduate study in significantly higher numbers than their counterparts at co-ed schools, especially in the natural sciences. Males seeking an all-male experience will find two options in the Fiske Guide, Hampden-Sydney College and Wabash College. Students with a firm career goal will want to look for a course of study that matches their needs. If you want to major in aerospace engineering, your search will be limited to schools that have the program. Outside of specialized areas like this, many applicants overestimate the importance of their anticipated major in choosing a college. If you're interested in a liberal arts field, your expected major should probably have little to do with your college selection. A big purpose of college is to develop interests and set goals. Most students change their intentions regarding a major at least two or three times before graduation, and once out in the working world, they often end up in jobs bearing no relation to their academic specialty. Even those with a firm career goal may not need as much specialization as they think at the undergraduate level. If you want to be a lawyer, don't worry yourself looking for something labeled "prelaw." Follow your interests, get the best liberal arts education available, and then apply to law school.

Naturally, it is never a bad idea to check out the department(s) of any likely major, and occasionally your choice of major will suggest a direction for your search. If you're really into national politics, it may make sense to look at some schools in or near Washington, D.C. If you think you're interested in a relatively specialized field, say, oceanography, then be sure to look for some colleges that are a good match for you and also have programs in oceanography. But for the most part, rumors about top-ranked departments in this or that should be no more than a tie-breaker between schools you like for more important reasons. There are good professors (and bad ones) in any department. You'll have plenty of time to figure out who is who once you've enrolled. Being undecided about your career path as a senior in high school is often a sign of intelligence.

Don't feel bad if you have absolutely no idea what you're going to do when you "grow up." One of the reasons you'll be paying megabucks to the college of your choice is the prospect that it will open some new doors for you and expand your horizons.

Instead of worrying about particular departments, try to keep the focus on big-picture items, such as: What's the academic climate? How big are the freshman classes? Do I like it here? and Are these my kind of people?

Customer Reviews

A Standard Guide to Colleges
The "Fiske Guide to Colleges" is probably the best known college guide in the country. This is the guide you will want to buy when you would like to read descriptions of most of the colleges that you have probably heard of. Most of the colleges and universities that the average high school student would be interested in are included. One feature that will appeal to many high school students is the ratings of a college's academics, social life, and quality of life. The social life opportunities at a college are an important consideration to a lot of today's teens. The guide rates the college's social life possibilities on a scale of 1 to 5 - with 5 being the highest. It has a similar 1 to 5 rating of each college's academic credentials that is based upon the school's reputation, the quality of its faculty, the quality of its facilities, the academic abilities of its students, and the academic seriousness of its students and faculty. There is also a 1 to 5 rating for the quality of life a school offers it students. This rating, however, seems somewhat difficult to pin down in terms of how it would affect any given student.

In some ways, the "Fiske Guide to Colleges" is the antithesis of books like "Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges". Whereas the "Colleges That Change Lives" book extols the advanages of small liberal arts colleges, the Fiske Guide seems to extol Ivy League and Ivy League wannabe schools. In fact, the author actually hints that the real reason some people say liberal arts colleges provide a better undergraduate education than Ivy League schools is due to sour grapes because they were not smart enough to get into the Ivy League schools!

Regardless of the reasons some people think small liberal arts colleges provide a better undergraduate education, there are some legitimate things to consider about the ratings in the Fiske Guide. First, the ratings and descriptions are subjective. They come from questionaires and interviews with those associated with the colleges. Ideally, it would have been nice if there would be some way to objectively consider every aspect of how a college meets the needs of various types of students. Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do that when considering so many colleges. Second, schools that the guide rates the highest academically tend to be the country's most prestigious schools (i.e., Ivy League and Ivy League wannabe schools), while most small private 4-year colleges are mostly rated academically average. However, the ratings cannot capture the value of smaller class sizes, a closer relationship of professors to their students, and a faculty in general more devoted to teaching than to research and publishing. Third, the guide's academic ratings do not prove that a school with world renown professors will give the typical undergraduate student much (if any) opportunity to learn directly from those professors. In fact, most of their classes will probably be taught by teaching assistants rather than the professors themselves. Finally, while reading the views of students at each college provides useful information about that particular college, it does not provide much in the way of comparative information. Most students will say good things about their colleges during interviews that they know will be published. The interviewed students have not attended the other colleges and are not in position to say their college is better than the others.

Despite its shortcomings, the "Fiske Guide to Colleges" is a valuable resource to have when evaluating colleges and universities. It provides College descriptions, and it includes ratings and statistics that most people will find useful.

3.5 stars... Not your first stop for college searching
Is it just me or are these college search/guidance books coming out sooner every year? I mean, we are barely into July, and here already is the 2010 edition of The Fisk Guide to Colleges. I am well aware that the publishing business on college search/guidance books is a multi-million business, but still.

"Fiske Guide to Colleges 2010" (774 pages) is a curious college-guidance/search book in my opinion. It lists the "best and most interesting" colleges in the country, about 300 out of 2,200 four year colleges in the US are written up. According to the introduction, they were selected on the basis of academic quality, geographic diversity, a balance of public and private schools, and schools that are currently popular for certain programs (engineering and technical schools, religious emphasis, etc.). Being from Ohio, I look at the list of schools that "made the cut" and inexplicably Xavier University (a fine Jesuit college here in Cincinnati) is left out of the book. Huh? While the descriptions give a good flavor of a particular college, there are essentials missing, such as the exact tuition/room/board (there is only a general 1 to 4 star rating on how expensive a college is). Also not helpful in my opinion is that the colleges are presented alphabetically, rather than by state, since most kids look at colleges in a particular state (usually their home state), although there is an index by state.

When my daughter was simply looking to get basic information, she did not spend a lot of time with this book. As she narrowed her choices, she did read up more on her pool of colleges in this book. Bottom line: if you are at the very beginning of your college search, this is not the book to start with. For that I would instead recommend "The Complete Book of Colleges" issued by the Princeton Review (the 2010 edition is coming out in early August). The "Fisk Guide to Colleges" is instead more helpful to get a second (or third) opinion once your child has narrowed down his/her selection of colleges of interest.

Detailed information with useful student feedback
This is one of the best college guides out there. It has a lot of great detailed information on the colleges including quotes from students. The number of colleges profiled is just right--enough to provide some options but not so many that it's overwhelming. I really like how Fiske shares which colleges are similar to the one you're interested in. That makes the college search a little easier.