America's Best Value Colleges

I have gotten my book, it has a ton of info that is vital to the college admission and finnancial aid. On what to put down on the admission to things that you just want to keeep for your self. As the colleges goes, theres maybe atleast one or two per state, but are colleges you have not heard of. The major universitys like UW-Madison are in there, or they take away from the major campus like insted of U of Minnesota-Twin Cities they use Dalmpth campus. So it is a mixed bag of colleges really. All great though, however use some old data and refering back to 2004 or 2005 admission year and telling about those and not really having current info, even though it is the 2008 edition. But still I would by this book, but I would by it at like a major book store to see the colleges list or go online someone maybe posted the colleges. Still a great book though!

I am about to embark on my second college application search for my kids, this time with my daughter who will start her junior HS year in August. We will make our first college campus visits in a few weeks. The Princeton Review issues a number of books on the topic, and this book caught my eye recently. "America's Best Value Colleges 2007" (531 pages) aims to provide an overview of the 150 colleges in America that provide "best value", as defined by The Princeton Review, i.e. a combination of academic rating, finacial aid rating and "tuition GPA". I will tell you that from my own perspective I found the choices to be somewhat bewildering, albeit informative. Being in Ohio, which has a wealth of both public and private schools, I hard a hard time accepting that only 2 Ohio schools (Denison, OSU) made the cut, the same number as, say, the state of Hawaii (with all due respect to my friends there). But the information provided in the book is quite insightful. I was about to give this book a lower rating but then I must tell you that the ultimate customer of this book, i.e. my daughter, has spent a lot of time reading through this book, which I can assure you she does not do unless she feels compelled to/is interested in doing so (and some other college books have not captured her imagination). That said, I still feel that The Princeton Review's "Best 361 Colleges" is a better book to get information about the college searching process.