Books for College

Johnny Jones, 21 April 1991

A college search can be a complicated business. There are thousands of schools in this country, with sharply different quality and offerings.

Our attitude in looking for a school for Bryan was that we did not know enough to guide him in a decision. So in the process of gleaning more information, we bought a dozen books, wrote hundreds of letters, and traveled from coast to coast. I thought those of you who are facing college in your children's future might be interested in some of the things we learned through our two years of college information gathering.

If your child is interested in one of the nation's better schools, the search should start the junior year. We began with buying all kinds of college guides. One of the best we found were The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, which does not list every school, but gives student's comments on the schools it does rate. Our campus visits confirmed almost every comment made in this excellent guide.

Another excellent guide with a more comprehensive compilation is Comparative Guide to American Colleges. We found guides with ratings and rankings most helpful; this one rated UMR "Very Selective," the same as Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The ratings go from no rating to Selective, Selective +, Very Selective, Very Selective +, Highly Selective, Highly Selective +, and Most Selective. Rice University and MIT are rated Most Selective. The first thing I did was mark in the book every school with a ranking of "Very Selective" or above which had an engineering department.

That does not mean that every college with a certain rating would be equally appropriate. Within each college, schools are better or worse; for example, UMC is rated only as "Selective +," but their school of Journalism is rated #1 in The Gourman Report, which rates undergraduate program in universities.

Sifting through each college with objective criteria was next. We made charts on each college, including items such as "Incoming Freshman average SAT," "College Population," and "Who Teaches Undergraduates?"


After we investigated through reading, Bryan made a decision early on not to apply to the monster schools (20,000+ students). Insider's Guide said, "Academically, two important areas of comparison between large and small schools are class size and the accessibility of senior faculty. On this issue, smaller colleges have the advantage....pay attention to WHO teaches. At most liberal arts colleges, only professors do. Many large universities pad their student-`faculty' ratios by including graduate students....if graduate students appear to dominate the teaching, even if only for the freshman year, you should definitely be concerned."

I recommended to Bryan schools that emphasized professors' relationship with students, and had a commitment to teaching. You see, some excellent colleges are rated well because their research is outstanding - but their undergraduate departments leave something to be desired. We didn't want Bryan to wait 2-4 years to have classes under real professors.

Yes, there are schools with this commitment. At MIT, "Victor Weiskopf, one of the best in his field (his fans rank him with Fermi and Einstein)...insists on teaching freshman physics." At Rose-Hulman, a comment from Insider's Guide was "I transferred from another very small college, but the contact with professors here is twice as good." At Rice University, one student said, "Faculty-student interaction, short of outright adoptions, couldn't be more intense."

Another factor to be considered is location. Insider's Guide pointed out, "Students from rural areas or small towns often overestimate the impersonal aspect and crime of a city....The most important reason for rural and small-town people to consider attending a college in or near a city is that it's a good way to find out how the other half lives....Although the transition to both college life and city life will make things more difficult at first, you may actually enjoy yourself sooner than you think." Campus visits told us how secure the students felt. Some schools in crime-ridden cities still seemed fairly safe; campus security was fairly tight, and students felt comfortable walking and cycling after dark.

We looked for location within the city. If the campus was in a wealthy part of the city, then property crimes against college students would likely be low: college kids would be poor compared to their neighbors. But if the campus were surrounded by low-income dwellings, criminals would be attracted to the relatively "rich" college students in the island of poverty.


More important than the size of the city was the size and population density of the campus. For example, Northwestern University, near Chicago, has almost 13,000 kids crammed onto 12 acres. The students there seemed creative and friendly, but there was a pedestrian and cycle traffic jam going from class to class. And parking? Even on more spread-out campuses it's a problem. At Northwestern it's close to impossible. MIT has a more spacious feel with 9,000 students on 132 acres - even though its location is near Boston, on the congested Northeast corridor.

Colleges have personality, and making sure your student fits their profile is the next step. Even the most highly-rated school is not best for every person. Next week I'll share more about our college search. What inspires me is knowing that, despite problems with public school education here, American colleges and universities are the best in the world. So when you and your student find the best school for him, you can know it is the best in the world. That helps make the search worthwhile.