Most young people rely on advice from their family, their friends, and their high school counselors. There are also many publications to help the college-bound student: material from colleges, college guidebooks, and now CD-ROMs, too.
These two CD-ROM products, Getting into College and The Interactive Fiske Guide to Colleges, provide entertaining, easy-to-use help for choosing a college. They take different approaches and provide different kinds of advice, so you should choose the one that suits your needs. Getting into College, from U.S. News & World Report, provides comprehensive coverage of over 1,400 colleges. The program's main screen gives you choices of areas to explore: How to Choose, How to Finance, How to Apply, and How to Prepare. Each of these contains a selection of advice, including articles from past issues of U.S. News & World Report and interviews with college students. There are other features, too: for example, the How to Finance section contains a worksheet for determining how much financial aid you could qualify for.
The heart of the CD-ROM is the section called Find Your College. Here you answer a series of questions about your college preferences, such as, region of the country, size of the school, student activities, and choice of major. An explanation of the subject's significance and some pertinent guidance accompanies each question. For example, the question about your college major lists over 150 majors, describes each one, and outlines required high school preparation, what courses you can expect to take in college, and what kinds of careers this major leads to.
After you answer the questions, the program compares your preferences to its list of colleges, then shows you the colleges that match your preferences. The list of colleges is in an on-screen notebook, which contains additional information for each college: a to-do list, showing admission deadlines for each college; financial information, showing what you could expect a year at each college to cost; and even a form letter requesting application information with your name and the college name filled in, ready to print.
Click on any of the colleges on your list to see a lengthy description of the college: admission requirements, deadlines, financial aid opportunities, and its position in the latest U.S. News & World Report college rankings. There are also lists of majors, student organizations, and special study programs, like study abroad.
The one weakness of the product is that this information is purely factual; there's no attempt to describe how students feel about the school or what it might be like to spend four years there. In all,though, Getting into College is a very impressive product, bringing together lots of information that you'll certainly find useful in your search for a college.
The other CD-ROM, The Interactive Fiske Guide to Colleges, takes a very different approach to providing college information. It doesn't try to be comprehensive. It covers only about 300 of the academically strongest colleges in the U.S. And the information about each college is in the form of an informal essay meant to give you a sense of what it's like to be a student at that institution.
When the program starts, it takes you to a list of 15 questions about your preferences, in areas like academic reputation, location, quality of life, and social life. Some of these questions seem pointless; would anyone prefer a college with a below-average quality of life? There's no question about areas of study, so you can't select only schools offering a particular major. And unlike Getting into College, you can't weight the importance given to individual questions.
After you complete the questions, the program gives you a list of colleges matching your criteria. For each school, you can see how the school's characteristics match your criteria, read an essay about the school, or for many entries, watch a video.
The essays are wr