Choosing the Right College 2004 : The Whole Truth About America's Top Schools (Choosing the Right College)

Since the first edition appeared in 1999, the ISI college guide, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth about America's Top Schools, has served as an essential reference resource for prospective students and their parents. Unlike other college guides, which too often read like paraphrases of university public-relations brochures, Choosing the Right College is an independently researched and written volume that covers the things that matter most, such as core curricula, campus crime, student living arrangements, the quality of teaching and student advising, freshman orientation, good professors to seek out, and courses and departments to avoid.

This, the 2004 edition, has been thoroughly revised and rewritten. It has also been expanded to include 120 of the nation's top private and public colleges and universities. As with previous editions, the editors provide candid assessments of the state of each school's academic curriculum, political atmosphere, and campus life. In this edition, students are also told which courses they can take at each school in order to provide themselves with a true core curriculum-a course of study that used to be required almost everywhere but now almost never is. This build-your-own-core feature helps make the 2004 edition more indispensable than ever for the student and parent seeking a genuine liberal arts education.