From: bd344@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Michael N Bastedo)
Newsgroups: soc.college
Subject: Re: College guides
Date: 17 Apr 92 17:58:22 GMT
Article-I.D.: usenet.1992Apr17.175822.22552
Reply-To: bd344@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Michael N Bastedo)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)


In a previous article, pshuang@athena.mit.edu (Ping-Shun Huang) says:

>Side note: I've changed the subject of this reply so as not to have the
>article killed by any kill files keying to "[Ff]rat".
>
>In article <1992Apr16.011443.29900@midway.uchicago.edu> thf2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank) writes:
>
> > Is there a college guide out there that's ever remotely accurate?
>
>I don't know of very many good ones. Actually, when I must amuse myself
>for a brief period of time at a bookstore (brief meaning I cannot delve
>into a book for real) I look through the college guides there to see how
>inaccurate or accurate they are. They're generally consistent on the
>numbers, probably because they get them from the same sources or copy
>them from each other. I have not found one which was so much better than
>any of the others that I would highly recommend it to anyone I know
>trying to figure out where they want to go to college.
>
>I would probably recommend campus visits over reading these guides, most
>of which seem to fall into two categories, at least for the effect they
>had on me: (a) produced by so many people that every description seems
>to be made of the same pre-digested pap and therefore completely
>useless; (b) produced by so few people that their personal biases and
>opinions show through more than anything about the school as a whole.
>
>If you have a friend there, going for a couple of days and *NOT* going
>on the pre-arranged tours and events for pre-freshmen, but simply
>participating in a few days of activities, gives a much better feel for
>whether you want to go there than anything else could. Sadly, this is
>often not an option financially. I made up my mind to come to MIT after
>deciding to visit ten days before the deadline, at which point I missed
>all the Admissions Office programs but stayed up until four or five
>every night talking to people while playing pool.
>
>Also, if there are any student-produced guides to the school, they can
>tell you a lot about what the campus is like. For the last fifteen
>years, there's been copies of a three-hundred page booklet called "How
>to Get Around MIT", universally abbreviated to "How to GAMIT", which
>goes to all the freshmen when they arrive in the fall, that is packed
>full of information you would never get from official brochures. I only
>wished they would send them to pre-freshmen as well.


I thought Fiske's Guide to Colleges was pretty good. For the most part, it
was right for my school (Oberlin) and it did a good job on a lot of other 
schools as well. It has 1 1/2 to 2 page essays on each school and goes over
common topics in each one like housing, quality of academic departments,
financial aid, etc. I recommend that you check this book out (you can find
it at most libraries) because it is rather expensive to purchase.

-- 
Michael N. Bastedo                       ! "If we do not succeed, we run the   
Internet: bd344@cleveland.freenet.edu    !  risk of failure"
          smb2866@ocvaxa.cc.oberlin.edu  !                   -Dan Quayle 
Bitnet:   smb2866@oberlin                !
Newsgroups: soc.college