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Title: The Fiske Guide to Colleges 2003 by Edward B. Fiske ISBN: 1-57071-957-8 Publisher: Sourcebooks Trade Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.44 (9 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Good, but not excellent
Comment: I give it 3 stars because it will take at least two weeks of repeated reading of this book to be able to compare the colleges mentioned in this book. With Princeton Review's "Best 345 colleges", it takes much less time.

As a consumer, I want to know what's good and bad about a college. I want a college guide that is like a Consumer's Report, that will test, compare and examine colleges critically. Though there are many college guides on the market, few examine colleges with a critical eye. The only good ones in my opinion are:
1) Choosing the right college - 5 stars
2) Colleges that change lives - 4 stars
3) Cool colleges - 5 stars
4) Best 345 colleges - 4.5 stars
5) The Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College - 4 stars

Since Fiske says something good about every college in this book, it takes a real detective work to find out what's bad about each college. I wish he points out the flaws in each college in a brief summary. For Harvard, the following would be a good summary:
1) Very serious grade inflation
2) Lots of classes taught by TAs
3) Professors are as unapproachable as stars in the sky
4) Large classes for freshman and sophomore years

This book is not as good as his other book, "The Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College," which contains a chapter called "The one hour college finder." This chapter has a brief paragraph on the best colleges. Each paragraph is right on the mark. For example, concerning Swartmore, it says "Pound for pound, the most intellectual school in the nation..." With regards to Carleton, "...the best liberal arts college in Midwest. Predominantly liberal..."

So, my advice is to get his other book. Not this one.

Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent
Comment: For my own purposes, I found this guide more helpful than the Princeton Review guide. It hasunbiased profiles of colleges to help in the decision making. I found the Fiske guide a little more all-encompassing, because it includes a lot of student quotes and weaves it all together for a nice synopsis. I found that Princeton Review kind of just packed their guide with random student quotes. Initially I had the same slight frustration with the dollar-sign system of tuition costs, but you might as well go online and ask for a guide book for each specific school, because they always include tuition figures and they will definitely be precise and up to date.

Rating: 5
Summary: Good...
Comment: If you are looking for a guidebook to colleges, this is the one you should get. DO NOT buy the Princeton Review's guide because all that information is available for free on their website (review.com). It's useful for beginning and narrowing down the college search. I wish that it would give actual tuition prices and I think it would be better to give some more admissions tips, but it's good for what it is.

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