COLLEGE RANKINGS

Counselors consistently advise prospective students to choose a college with the best combination of programs, size, style, price, and location. Among the many materials available to help prospective students sort the thousands of colleges and universities in the United States, there are several rating instruments.

• Peterson's and Kaplan are two companies that produce many different products about education. Peterson's guide is called Peterson's Guide to Competitive Colleges. Kaplan publishes Kaplan Publishing's Most Interesting Colleges, and 2005—The Unofficial Unbiased Guide to the 331 Most Interesting Colleges.

• Education writers of major newspapers have also developed their list of recommended schools. Loren Pope, long-time education writer for the New York Times, has produced Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives, 40 Schools You Should Know About Even if You're Not a Straight-A Student, and Edward B. Fiske, former New York Times education editor, produced the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Washington Post education writer Jay Matthews has a list of top 10 colleges that deserve a second look in his Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That Is Best for You.

• The Templeton Foundation, in Pennsylvania, produces The Templeton Guide: Colleges That Encourage Character Development.

• Frederick E. Rugg, a veteran college counselor, wrote Rugg's Recommendations on the Colleges, which goes beyond recommending colleges to listing outstanding departments at quality schools.

• The Yale Daily News's The Insider's Guide to the Colleges 2005 looks at life at more than 300 colleges, using student interviews, rather than administrators' reports, to develop the ratings.

Major magazines also weigh in. Several produce college-rating issues that receive great attention. One of the most influential and widely quoted of these is U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges" and "America's Best Graduate Schools."

[http://www.usnews.com/usnews/home.htm].

U.S. News gives its rankings and key information for colleges in a number of categories: national universities (a nation-wide listing); master's universities (listed by region); best business programs; best liberal arts colleges; top engineering programs; and top comprehensive universities, a national list of colleges that have strong undergraduate programs with more than 50 percent of the students studying something outside of the liberal arts (ranked in regional lists).

A final resource is a Web site provided by the Education and Social Science Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The site gives links to many online ranking services, other sources of information about colleges and universities, and even some sites discussing the relative value of rankings. [http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankings.htm]