Series: College Admissions Guides
Paperback: 1152 pages
Publisher: Princeton Review; 2017 ed. edition (July 5, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1101919809
ISBN-13: 978-1101919804
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 1.5 x 10.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #10,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Books > Reference > Catalogs & Directories #13 in Books > Education & Teaching > Higher & Continuing Education > College Guides #43 in Books > Education & Teaching > Higher & Continuing Education > Test Preparation > College Entrance
The Complete Book of Colleges presents, in encyclopedic fashion, a vast array of details on colleges and universities. It also judges the quality of schools, designating some of them as among the 351 best. However, to learn more about what makes a school one of the best, the reader must buy an additional Princeton Review book.This guide resembles most other available college guides and these similarities are not accidental. All of today's college guides gather their most important information from the same source: the common data set (see [...] Originally established to standardize and ease the distribution of college information, the common data set now seems to function as a barrier to original efforts to evaluate American colleges and universities.The Princeton Review touts its guide as "the best place to begin, fine-tune and execute the search for your perfect college." Given that everybody uses the same data, that claim seems a little dubious and resembles advertising campaigns by soap manufacturers desperately trying to differentiate almost identical products.The publishing industry's sloth is glaringly evident in their failure to pressure colleges and universities to provide important test score information left out of the common data set. Industry representatives participate in the common data set initiative; yet, their role appears completely passive.This guide only lists information on test scores taken by entering high school students (for example, the SAT I, ACT, etc.). No score information is reported for tests taken by students in college, such as the Medical College Admissions Test, Law School Admissions Test, Graduate Record Examinations, or Graduate Management Admissions Test; yet, these scores would seem to reflect better college achievement.
My youngest just started college a few weeks so I'm officially done with the college process but when I saw this as my local library, I couldn't resist picking this up, just out of curiosity."The Princeton Review Complete Book of Colleges (2009 Edition)" (1,572 pages) is, in all but details pretty much the same as the 2008 edition, not that it's a bad thing or that it matters, as most readers will likely be new to the college search process, or restarting it after a few years off. The best thing about this book that it does offer a pretty good overview of the 1,800 or so colleges profiled in here. All of those colleges are listed alphabetically, which makes it a bit less user-friendly. It is a fact that 80% of kids look to colleges in their home state, so why not have the colleges grouped by state? There is, to be fair, an index in the back of colleges by state, among other indexes, such as size, environment, cost, and selectivity. The last 500 pages of the book is in essence paid advertising by those colleges that wanted to pay for that (each college receives 2 pages; the editorial content of that section was done entirely by the colleges themselves, NOT by the Princeton Review).The biggest flaw in this book is that for some inexplicable reason there are a good number college profiles that lack information on tuition and room/board cost. How can that be? All that said, this book is a just okay starting point for anyone in the college search process, in particular if the student does not have any strong feelings about which colleges are on his or her shortlist. For a better alternative when you're just starting, I'd suggest the 2009 Edition of the gigantic (closer to 3000 pages) "Peterson's Four Year Colleges". But by no means should it be the end point.
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