Best 201 Colleges for the Real World, The

The Best 201 Colleges for the Real World by Michael P. Viollt Octameron Associates, 2000 $15. 00, 227 pages, paperback

Michael Viollt's The Best 201 Colleges for the Real World creates a guide for the "student-consumer" (227). As he notes, college students today gravitate toward one of two groups: working adults and recent high school graduates.With these two groups being his audience, I feel he is only half-successful with his success appealing only to a narrow student demographic.

The working adult, often with children, a spouse, and a mortgage, seeks a cost-effective education that immediately prepares him or her for career advancement or transition. Viollt's guide can be a valuable commodity for this group. Each profile addresses matters of which the working adult is often more cognizant. The "Tuition vs. Time to Graduation" matrix may be of value to the working adult eager to "Get In. Get Out. Get a Job," as the guide's subtitle proclaims. Many of the other items, including the prose section "Unique Features" add a viable, useful life to the graphical data. Viollt considers, rightly so, his collected data a "starting point" for the process (22). This statement is correct and should appear in many more college guides than it does.

From the cover subtitle to its final profile of Wisconsin Lutheran College, this guide is an intelligent work of concision, well substantiated with recent research data. I fear that this quality is also a latent flaw, for I have begun recently to understand that data, though valuable, is not information. Many college guides seek to provide an exhaustive review of each college, from academics to financial aid, from the best dorms to best Tuesday night watering hole. Some succeed and some fail. Those that succeed may provide the reader with the only guide they feel they require. Viollt advises, again rightly so, readers "to go directly to the colleges and universities that interest you to get primary source data" (20). A reader looking to "get in and get out" of the evaluation process, a dreadful mistake that Viollt would surely consider ill advised, may choose to "get in and move on" to a more thorough "information" source.

From a purely statistical view, there are two things I wish the guide told the reader: (1) the number of colleges that submitted data for consideration and (2) the process of determining the weight factor for each criterion. I can only infer from the absence of these items that: (1) only 201 colleges submitted data for consideration and (2) that the weight factors were arbitrarily prescribed. I hope my inference is incorrect and many other wonderful schools failed to match up to the 201 institutions selected by the computer model armed with its carefully weighted factors.

The book's initiation into the college guide fraternity may be slow. Its bookish style is cumbersome at first. Though its premise seeks to identify a new battery of evaluating criteria, it does not address that the old battery was so insufficient that it needed an overhaul. Viollt aggressively pursues the development of the new battery and does so with success. My concern was: will it catch on with the recent high school graduate group that Viollt identifies? In an entirely unscientific trial, I gave the book to a sampling of my college-prep high school students, grades 9 through 12. The ninth and tenth grade test subjects were bewildered. The cluster area approach was too advanced for them; most do not know the difference-even with Viollt's prefatory descriptions-- between the analytical computational cluster and the applied quantitative cluster, let alone why computer science and computer engineering are distinct programs of study. The eleventh and twelfth grade students had less difficulty with the guide. They seemed able to comprehend the language of the data, including the nuances of the diagrams and the cluster system. However, when I asked them the following question I received mixed reviews: Would you use this college guide? Some asked why universities like Harvard or Stanford, whose real world collateral is significant, do not appear. My response was, "I don't know." To be honest, I still don't.

I recently saw a television ad for a financial publication that showed a disgruntled financial magazine reader frustrated by the "10 Stocks Just for You!" (or something to that effect) claim. The reader protested that those stock tips were, in fact, just for him and the thousands of other readers. Viollt's guide employs the second-person pronouns of "you," "yourself," and "your" to imbue the reader with the comforting sense that this guide is written just for them. Viollt, armed with the four data sources listed on page 18, has created a volume of research that may be of interest to those colleges who submitted data and even for those who did not. Viollt's guide will work for the working adult or recent high school graduate who possesses these three attributes: 1) one who must pay their own college expenses, 2) is unconcerned with where U.S. News and World Report ranks the 201 colleges and is keen to possible peer, familial, and societal pressures to be so concerned, and 3) will diligently acquire "information" from the college and its student body directly. A large number of such applicants, unfortunately for guidance and admission counselors alike, might not exist in the "real world."

Reviewed by Sean Kennedy, associate dean of academics at the Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, CA.

Copyright National Association of College Admissions Counselors Winter 2002
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