There are literally hundreds of college guides being published. Many of these are very specialized guides designed for particular populations such as The Performing Arts Major’s College Guide or Schools that Rock: The Rolling Stone College Guide and I won’t try to provide you with an exhaustive list of college guides. Instead, I want to give you a sense of some of the most generally useful guides that can help you locate a college that works for you and to point out how one of the most popular guide books may not be the most helpful research tool.

A guide to college guides

There are literally hundreds of college guides being published. Many of these are very specialized guides designed for particular populations such as The Performing Arts Major’s College Guide or Schools that Rock: The Rolling Stone College Guide and I won’t try to provide you with an exhaustive list of college guides. Instead, I want to give you a sense of some of the most generally useful guides that can help you locate a college that works for you and to point out how one of the most popular guide books may not be the most helpful research tool.

There are numerous printed college guides that allow you to research large numbers of colleges very quickly and narrow in on a list of colleges worth a second look. The publishers of these guides all face the same basic business pressures and publishing limitations, but they have addressed them slightly differently leaving you with a sometimes confusing array of choices.

One pressure that all these publishers face is that they are in the publishing business and they need their guidebooks to sell in order to keep publishing them. Some guides attempt to capture market share by being the most comprehensive source of information about colleges, but there is a limit to how many broad reference style college guides the market will support. So other publishers slant their publications by covering fewer colleges but providing more "insider" information by surveying students, or ranking colleges and presenting information only on those colleges that receive the highest rankings.

A few guides I will point out in this section focus on the value received for your college investment. As a general rule, the fewer colleges covered in a guide, the more in depth the coverage of each college, but unfortunately that is not always the case. A few guides, which I won’t bother to recommend, cover a sample of colleges based on which colleges respond to their survey and simply pass on what the colleges report about themselves without much if any investigation. These books are cheap to produce and are simply profit making ventures on the part of various publishers.

Since you have so many college guides available I recommend that you stick with established guides that have some history of providing reliable and accurate information. The one exception to this rule is that it is generally worth looking at a guide that is focused on your exact college interests even if it is new or not widely known. A guide to the best colleges for studying marine biology is worth looking at if you are an aspiring marine biologist if only as an easy way to get a list of colleges that offer programs in this field. Most likely you will also learn more about how to evaluate these programs from seeing what information appears in such a guide.

The following listing is a selection of guides that you may find useful in your college search. These guides cost money, so I recommend you choose only one or two guides to own, or check out the library or the office of your high school guidance counselors to see if they have current guides available for your use. While looking through guides remember that you are using these books to help you find possible colleges that would meet your needs. Don’t expect the guides to provide you with enough information to really evaluate a college. Once you have narrowed down your list you will need to contact the college admissions office and request additional information.

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Peterson’s Four-Year College Guide and Peterson’s Two-Year College Guide

Peterson’s publishes the largest selection of college guides, but the most comprehensive are the Four-Year and Two-Year college guides. These books provide basic information about virtually all the two and four year programs in North America. This information includes the size of the school, programs of study offered, whether they are public or private, religious affiliations, percentage of applicants admitted, test scores of enrolled students, tuition and the percentage of students receiving financial aid. These guides also include descriptions of a selection of colleges that were written by the colleges themselves. These are paid placements and should not be confused with objective evaluation of the colleges, but they may be helpful in giving you a sense of the educational philosophy and special features of these colleges.

U.S. News Ultimate College Guidebook:

For better or for worse, U.S. News & World Report magazine has become the biggest force in college rankings with their annual America’s Best Colleges lists of top colleges rated in rank order based on a formula that considers factors like how hard it is to gain admission, what other university presidents and senior executives think about a schools reputation, and what percentage of the alumni contribute to the college after graduation.

Landing at the top of the U.S. News rankings can generate thousands of additional applications for a college, and many who work for colleges or critically observer U.S. higher education worry that the impact of these rankings set off an SAT/ACT arms race among colleges as they try to claim the high rating prize. Of course as a prospective student simply going for the school that gets to chant, "We’re number 1!" based on this years rankings doesn’t usually make the most sense.

The Ultimate College Guidebook takes the same data submitted by most four-year colleges for the rankings, and re-uses it in a variety of interesting and often helpful ways. This is a book full of lists, including most and least expensive schools, best value schools, schools with the best graduation rates, and so on. These lists could draw your attention to some colleges that fit your profile, or they may just turn out to be an interesting variation on the, "Who’s number one?" game that isn’t of any particular use to you given your college selection guidelines. The book includes listings for individual colleges include the usual selection of data, and the descriptions are fairly limited. Slightly fewer colleges are included than for Peterson’s, The College Board’s or The Princeton Review guides.

The College Board’s College Handbook

The College Board is the organization that runs the SAT tests. This guide is similar to a combination of the Peterson’s four year and two year college guides combined into one book. This is convenient if you are looking at both two and four year options. The book provides basic data about each college including number of students, number of applicants and percentages admitted, test scores of entering students, tuition and financial aid information. It does not try to provide much additional information beyond these numbers.

Barron’s Profile of American Colleges

Another comprehensive guide to four year colleges, the Barron’s book provides the same basic information as the other comprehensive college guides. Barron’s put in some additional effort into providing useful information from a prospective college student’s perspective. They rate each college on a five point scale for how selective they are in admitting students. They include an index of college majors which is a big help if you know what you want to study and only want to look at colleges with that program. The major descriptions give some idea of the requirements for being admitted to and completing the listed majors. They even include a CD-ROM with a database of their college listings and an easy program for filtering the colleges by various criteria. While this book provides perhaps the most user friendly presentation of data it is relatively weak in providing additional descriptive details about the colleges listed.

The Princeton Review: The Complete College Book

Another guide to nearly all the four year colleges in North America. This guide also contains the basic admissions information, lists of programs, counts of students and tuition and financial aid information as Peterson’s and The College Board’s guides. Also, like Peterson’s it includes longer descriptions provided by colleges themselves and included because the colleges chose to pay for running these advertisement pages. Again, these may actually be helpful, but don’t mistake them for an independent assessment of the colleges.

The Princeton Review: The Best 361 Colleges

By covering fewer colleges in this guide the Princeton Review writers are able to provide much more descriptive information about each college. Well written, this book also provides some useful information about the college selection process itself. By including quotes from survey’s completed by current students and recent graduates, as well as information provided by the colleges this guide presents a more complete assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each school. Numerous rankings by different factors may draw your attention to colleges that fit your interests but that you otherwise might have overlooked. By focusing on the best colleges, however, the book is also focusing on the more competitive colleges to get into. Depending on your high school grades and test scores this may or may not be the most useful set of colleges to consider.

Fiske Guide to Colleges

The Fiske Guide does not try to provide a comprehensive listing of colleges. Instead, it provides a more in depth review of approximately 300 high quality colleges. These reviews include information about the number of students, the most popular and most outstanding programs of study, test scores of students, percentage of students receiving financial aid, a description of the campus and community, and also comments from current students about the unique features of each college. There is also a rating of the programs that provide the best educational value, defined as high quality education at below average cost. Although Fiske doesn’t claim this is a guide to selective colleges, in effect that is what the colleges listed turn out to be. Very useful if you know you want an academically challenging college experience. Less useful if you are not sure you can gain admission to a selective college.

The Insiders Guide to the Colleges

Compiled by the staff of the Yale Daily news, this is the longest running publication that attempts to provide a guide to colleges from a student’s perspective. Covering 320 colleges it tends to focus on the more prestigious and selective colleges, so as with other select guides this may not be the best place to turn for possible colleges if your test scores put you closer to the 25th than to the 75th percentile. If a college on your list is covered by this guide you will get a sense for how a few students feel about that school, and you will get a bit less data about the college than you would get from one of the comprehensive guides like Peterson’s. Despite their long history, and their association with my Alma Mater this book is less a useful guide for compiling a list of prospective colleges and more a college gossip column. That may account for the high sales rank it enjoys compared to other college guides.

Students' Guide to Colleges : The Definitive Guide to America's Top 100 Schools Written by the Real Experts--the Students Who Attend Them

In contrast to The Insider’s Guide this book provides multiple student perspectives on each college it reviews, uses a consistent format and does provide a clearer sense of what it might be like to be a student at each college. No sample of opinions, however, is going to be a complete substitute for actually speaking with current students who have goals and interests similar to your own. Combined with the focus on only 100 highly selective colleges this book is probably more useful as a second perspective on colleges you’ve already identified as prospects rather than as a research tool for creating your prospects list in the first place.

America’s Best Colleges for B Students

This guide to 75 colleges that you don’t need straight A’s or exceptional SAT scores to attend could be a very useful resource if that is your situation. In addition to drawing your attention to some good colleges that you could attend, it provides some perspective on how you can thrive in college even if your primary focus isn’t on earning the highest possible grades. The college reviews include a good discussion of which schools particularly value student involvement in campus life or community service. It also provides information on which academic support services may be available to help a B student in high school do as well or better in the more academically challenging environment of college.

Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even If You're Not a Straight-A Student

This guidebook is worth reading if for no other reason than to get a good alternative perspective to the college-as-status-symbol competitive race to get into one of those select few institutions with a nationally recognized name brand. The forty colleges listed tend to do an exceptional job of creating residential learning communities and pursuing the liberal arts college curriculum. Depending on your interests this type of college may or may not be your top choice, but it is worth considering especially if one of the top reasons why you want to go to college is to learn more about who you are and what you want your one chance at living your life to be about. This book would be a very useful compliment to one of the comprehensive guidebooks. There are certainly more than 40 out of the over 4,000 U.S. colleges which are changing lives, but understanding what the author saw in these 40 colleges may help you evaluate other colleges as well. And if you are looking for a liberal arts college these 40 are well worth considering.