A college degree has never been more important—or more expensive. If you're not made of money, where can you get an amazing liberal arts education without your parents having to remortgage the house or cash in their retirement fund? Which degrees will allow you to fulfill your dreams and earn a decent paycheck? What do you really need to know if you're the first in your family to go to college? How do you find good schools that offer a well-rounded campus life for black or Latino students? From the staff of Washington Monthly comes a new kind of college guide, inspired by and including the magazine's signature alternative college rankings. The Other College Guide features smartly designed, engaging chapters on finding the best-fit schools and the real deal about money, loans, and preparing for the world of work. This essential higher ed handbook also highlights information on what to look for (and watch out for) in online programs and for-profit colleges and concludes with fifty profiles of remarkable but frequently overlooked schools. All things being unequal, The Other College Guide will provide American students—and their families and school counselors—with the honest and practical information they need to make sense of the college process and carve a path to the future they imagine.

Small college professors from across the United States explain why liberal arts institutions remain the gold standard for higher education. The fevered controversy over America’s educational future isn’t simply academic; those who have proposed sweeping reforms include government officials, politicians, foundation officers, think-tank researchers, journalists, media pundits, and university administrators. Drowned out in that noisy debate are the voices of those who actually teach the liberal arts exclusively to undergraduates in our nation’s small liberal arts colleges, or SLACs. The Best Kind of College attempts to rectify that glaring oversight. As an insiders’ “guide” to the liberal arts in its truest form the volume brings together thirty award-winning professors from across the country to convey in various ways some of the virtues, the electricity, and, overall, the importance of the small-seminar, face-to-face approach to education, as typically featured in SLACs. Before we in the United States abandon or compromise our commitment to the liberal arts—oddly enough, precisely at a time when our global competitors are discovering, emulating, and founding American-style SLACs and new liberal arts programs—we need a wake-up call, namely to the fact that the nation’s SLACs provide a time-tested model of educational integrity and success. “At last, some good news about education! This collection brings together essays by professors at small liberal arts colleges, voices largely unheard in the debates raging about higher education. It ranges widely through disciplines and across colleges, taking us into classrooms where we see the creative, inventive kinds of teaching that go on when classes are kept small and professors can interact with students. This book is a welcome corrective to claims that higher education is ‘broken’ and in need of a high-tech fix, a quiet reminder that ‘innovation’ goes on as a matter of course at colleges where teaching is top priority and is kept to human scale.” — Gayle Greene, Scripps College “McWilliams and Seery have achieved something remarkable: they have found a new and interesting way to present the case for the liberal arts model in American education. More than that, they have managed to show the value of, as well as present the argument for, the model. At its best, the book recreates something of the experience of a liberal arts education in microcosm. This is a wonderful, provocative, engaging, and moving book. It is unlikely to be surpassed.” — Simon Stow, author of Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis

Praise for the previous edition : "This would be a good reference book for any high school or public library."

For prospective college students and their parents, here are the best schools that have not succumbed to "political correctness", those that still uphold the liberal arts tradition of Western civilization, where the famous teachers actually teach the core curriculum courses.

When it comes to academic excellence, the Ivy Leagues aren't the only schools worth their salt. And nobody knows that better than Edward B. Fiske. Beyond the Ivies introduces an exclusively selected sample from the 2014 Guide to Colleges of ten schools that have redefined what it means to be a top university. From leading engineering institutions to small liberal arts colleges, discover which of these academic elites fits your needs the most! Includes: -Full-color photos -Full-color infographics -Links to school websites -Links to admission email addresses