Four Books For Better College Lists
Build a smarter, more realistic college list with four guidebooks that actually help you move beyond the same “name brand” schools everyone talks about.
Finding reliable sources for “realistic” college lists and research can be hard.
Google gives you namebrand, but highly selective colleges.
Your friends and family recommend what they know - which can be helpful, but is often a very small slice of the ~2,400 primarily 4-year degree granting institutions in the USA.
And ChatGPT can do a pretty good job if you want to spend a LOT of time crafting custom prompts and going back-and-forth to refine your searches.
Here are 4 books that make the process easy, and are a great addition to any high school student’s library.
Fiske Guide To Colleges
I’m not saying that if a college isn’t in this book it is not a good college. But, I am saying that if a college is listed in this book it is a very good college.
If you only get one college guidebook - this is it.
Pro tip: Use the lists at the front of the book (before the individual college pages). These often-overlooked lists help you narrow by state, price band, and even common majors. Also, walk the overlaps - like the Amazon shopping “people who looked at this also looked at that” - to find comparable colleges you may not be as familiar with.
Princeton Review - The Best 391 Colleges
TBH, there’s a lot of overlap between this book and the Fiske Guide.
What sets this book apart from the rest are the campus culture blurbs.
I’ve visited a LOT of colleges, and generally find these write-ups re: campus life and vibe to be spot-on representations of what it is actually like on those campuses.
Given that most high school students and families aren’t going to be able to travel and tour extensively to cross-compare, these write-ups are more than worth the $20 price of admission.
Colleges That Change Lives
If you are looking for smaller, liberal arts colleges this is your guidebook.
Also, you can see more about these colleges via the organisation’s website -
https://ctcl.org/
. This group of schools does attend college fairs/tours each year. Definitely worthwhile getting face time with their admissions staff to learn more.
Dream School
This is a bad title (maybe an editor optimising for book sales?) for a good book.
The premise is one you’ve probably heard many times - almost all college students could benefit from looking outside a small handful of “named” colleges when searching for their best fit options.
What sets this book apart is that it actually names names.
You get a long list of colleges that are both really good schools and reasonable for most high school students to actually get admitted to.