Objective college profile books give you the basic facts about colleges: number of students, majors, admissions data, housing information, cost, addresses. A number of publishers put them out, and they all have much of the same data. Some examples of objective profile books are:

College Board College Handbook
Kaplan’s College Catalogue
Peterson’s College Review
Lovejoy’s College Guide

Subjective college profile books are a bit more controversial and more useful. Usually based on questionnaires distributed to students, professors, administrators and deans, the profiles in these books are an attempt to characterize the aspects of a college that cannot be quantified: social atmosphere, academic pressure and competition, quality of housing, food and attitudes of students and faculty. If you use these books, make sure to read a number of them; don’t take one book’s word on any subject. Some examples of subjective profile books are:

The Fiske Guide to Colleges
Princeton Review’s Guide
Yale’s Insider’s Guide to Colleges
Cool Colleges
Colleges That Changed Lives
The Public Ivys

There are other guidebooks that help students understand the entire process. These resources have been quite useful to several students. Some recommended titles are:

Colleges That Change Lives by Lauren Pope
The College Admissions Mystique by Bill Mayher

In addition to these titles, we have a collection of books that may be checked out from Mrs. Green's office. Please stop by to check them out.

College catalogues contain the most definitive source of information about a college. These are college specific and are mailed to you when you request information from the college. (We also keep a collection in the office.) These catalogues contain information about the school calendar, the academic policies, the professors and specific course and major information.

Videos and CDs are readily available and can give you a visual image of the campus and the general student body. It seems that on a promotional video, every day is sunny and every student is smiling; however, these can be useful tools to get an idea of what the campus looks like. If there is not a video available for the school you are looking at, first ascertain whether there is an online virtual tour, and if not, please see Mrs. Green to order a video of the school.

For online help, please check out our links to some of the most popular college-ranking websites available today. Click here.

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