A thorough yet concise guide to college admissions that covers a lot of familiar territory.
The intimidating process of applying to college is broken down into manageable chunks for students and parents in this relatively compact volume.
The editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review, which provides services to college applicants, tries to demystify topics from choosing your best fit college—in terms of academics and affordability—to navigating the bewildering worlds of standardized testing (whether, when, and which) and financial aid. The guide covers frequently asked questions about the best classes to take in high school, the importance of extracurriculars, how to navigate online applications, and more. Institutions named in the examples are overwhelmingly elite private schools and prestigious state universities, an unfortunately narrow focus. No mention is made of the increasingly popular option among upper-middle-class families of looking overseas for affordable alternatives. Despite glancing references to saving money by attending a local community college before transferring to a four-year institution, the overall assumption is that families will be able to afford to invest a lot of time and money in this process. Fortunately, guides like Loren Pope and Hilary Masell Oswald’s Colleges That Change Lives (Penguin, 2012), which focuses on liberal arts colleges, and Strive for Colleges’ I’m First! Guide to College (Strive for College Collaborative, 2018), for first-generation college students, help fill in some of these gaps.
A thorough yet concise guide to college admissions that covers a lot of familiar territory. (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5853-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Princeton Review
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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