As editor of Choosing the Right College, I frequently hear back from parents and students with cogent questions about the guide—along with notes of thanks and suggestions for improvement. One of the most frequent questions I get is this: How do you decide which colleges to cover? This is often followed by a specific inquiry as to why a particular university—one which the reader likes, and wishes to recommend—isn’t covered. It’s an excellent question.

Our guide is first of all a work of journalism; that’s one reason why I was chosen to edit it, since I have worked at a variety of business, political, and theological publications for the past 20 years, beginning with the conservative paper at Yale. We also hire journalists to do research on the individual schools, and consult the best material available from other publications to keep our facts up to date and report on the most significant developments that affect education. Because it’s a work of journalism, we’re obliged to cover (among others) the schools which are considered the bellwethers, the trendsetters in modern education, whose practices in areas such as curriculum, affirmative action, and academic freedom actually set the precedent (for good or ill) at hundreds of other schools. For instance, when Harvard trashed its traditional core curriculum in the 1970s, replacing a once-demanding and comprehensive set of prescribed, foundational courses with a set of distributional requirements, administrators at campuses across the country followed suit—to the point where only a few well-known schools, and a hardy band of counter-cultural liberal arts academies, maintain the old standards which used to prevail at any first-rank university or college. Because of this trend-setting effect, it’s essential that we cover schools whose policies we find far from optimal (for instance, Harvard). It’s what any buyer of a college guide would have the right to expect—coverage of the schools which “lead the field,” even if they’re leading the flock over a cliff.

We determine which schools are leaders by consulting the same objective criteria used at other college guides, such as the U.S. News and World Report ranking, the first of which is selectivity. The schools which can take their pick of the most ambitious, high-scoring students in the country necessarily exert a disproportionate impact on the rest of American education. They’re also the places which prospective students and their parents want to read about—to see if they can (or should wish to) attend them. So we present these readers with the top 40 most selective national universities, and the top 35 most selective liberal arts colleges.

For some of these students, these schools will be out of reach, and reading about them falls more in the realm of daydreaming—an educational Breakfast At Tiffany’s. For others, these places may well be within their academic reach, but they would not prosper there. For instance, a shy, sensitive conservative Baptist girl who likes to fit in with the crowd should probably not enroll at Wesleyan in Connecticut. If the coed bathrooms don’t gross her out, the pornographic chalkings on the sidewalk will; she will encounter few professors who share her point of view, and fewer religiously committed students. On the other hand, a rabble-rousing firebrand who likes to go against the grain might well prosper at a far-left school—using the classroom as a forge in which to strengthen his debating skills, and learning the best counter-arguments to his most treasured beliefs. There is no one school which is perfect for everyone; so we try to present a broader range.

To widen our reach, we have included almost 60 other schools which are of interest for other reasons than sheer selectivity:

• Important regional schools, such as Louisiana State University and Texas A&M, which provide affordable educations to citizens of their states—and often contain “buried treasures,” excellent honors programs or outstanding departments, that can make those schools the best choice for some students who could otherwise aim “higher” in terms of reputation (and price).

• Praiseworthy liberal arts schools, such as Thomas Aquinas College in California and Wheaton College in Illinois, which have maintained or resurrected the traditional core curriculum, offering to every student the riches of Western civilization, and guaranteeing that each of their graduates has drunk from the wells of humanistic learning.

• The three main military academies in the United States. These schools are a new addition to our guide. In a time when so many of our fellow Americans are risking their lives to advance our country’s interests overseas, we thought it important to evaluate the academies which provide the U.S. military with its leadership class.

We would like to include more colleges in the guide; we have added nine schools just this year, and plan to add more in the future. But our book is already around 1000 pages thick, and could serve as an effective doorstop for most dorm rooms in America. We do need to pick our shots, covering both the famous schools (some of which no longer deserve their reputations) and a selection of smaller, newer, or distinctively traditional colleges that offer an alternative to students and parents seeking it. So if your favorite school isn’t included in our guide, don’t take it as a snub. But do write us if you know of a place we have missed which maintains a serious core curriculum and high academic standards. We will certainly consider it. In fact, we rely on readers’ feedback to improve every year.

In my next column, I will let you in on how we research and evaluate the colleges and universities we cover. Stay tuned.

Interesting. A question, though -- while I've been frantically trying to find a copy of your guide in a D.C. area library (I'm already in college, but it sounds like interesting reading), I must go by what I hear, at NRO and other corners of the web...

...I like the idea of showing kids how to make their own core curriculum at schools which do not require it, but is restriction necessarily a good thing?

One of the fundamental plusses of choosing Georgetown, for me, was that so long as you scored well on AP tests, there was no requirement whatsoever for mathematics, english, or science.

Brown, indeed, is even better in that if you want to, say, study engineering (As both my mother and father did at that institution), you can jump right in, and not be bothered with other, irrelevant areas of study.

For those who are very driven and focused and do not need a bureaucracy telling them what to learn (A distaste for bureaucracy! How conservative!), constricting requirements on which classes to take are not useful. From my personal experience, the basic political and social thought class (Covering Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Hume, Marx, and a few others) was, despite the high quality of instruction, quite possibly the largest waste of time I've ever experienced (I'm pursuing, hopefully, a five-year masters' in security studies). No thinking man *needs* a philosophy course (and I'd care to wager that the benefits a thinking man may gain from such courses is next to nothing), so to be constrained by such a requirement (When I could be studying something useful such as, say, nuclear arms proliferation) is a grating, insufferable burden.

Why does your book, from the myriad of reviews I've looked at until I can, myself, get my hands upon a copy, look at such needless bureaucracy so favorably?

By "needless bureaucracy” you seem to mean a college requiring a core curriculum in the humanities. I haven’t read the book in question, but I’ll wager a guess that this “bureaucracy” is looked on favorably on the presupposition that the typical undergraduate student doesn’t know what is good for him, which is why he is a student.

Perhaps your distaste for bureaucracy is conservative, but your distaste of the Western tradition of thought is anything but conservative, as is your insistence on philosophical self-reliance. Indeed, your favor of “security studies” over the humanities suggests you are a bureaucratic wolf in sheep’s clothing, since an appreciation for the humanities is one of our greatest defenses against the current bureaucratic centralization of power in America (I say this because an appreciation for organic, local communities accompanies an appreciation for the humanities). When you have amassed enough “useful” information about nuclear proliferation, what will you do with it besides create more government machinery?

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but I’ll wager a guess that this “bureaucracy” is looked on favorably on the presupposition that the typical undergraduate student doesn’t know what is good for him, which is why he is a student.

So, in essence, this is not a book for people who don't know what is good for them?

..Odd way to self-select your audience.

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Perhaps your distaste for bureaucracy is conservative, but your distaste of the Western tradition of thought is anything but conservative, as is your insistence on philosophical self-reliance.

Building one one's forebears is fine and dandy -- when it is beneficial in some way. For instance, in physics. Or in mathematics.

In philosophy? It's a crutch.

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Indeed, your favor of “security studies” over the humanities suggests you are a bureaucratic wolf in sheep’s clothing, since an appreciation for the humanities is one of our greatest defenses against the current bureaucratic centralization of power in America

I see the security studies as a way to gain the most beautiful appreciation of the humanities of all. But that's just me.

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(I say this because an appreciation for organic, local communities accompanies an appreciation for the humanities).

The world is an organic, local community. What's the difference at the level you suppose, except that it's easier to control?

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When you have amassed enough “useful” information about nuclear proliferation, what will you do with it besides create more government machinery?

Remove government machinery, when appropriate. (Hint: Nuclear proliferation is not an issue easily solved by the removal of government machinery)

Nice spin on it, though. But aren't Republicans in favor of increased defense spending these days?

Since I'm not a member or a follower of any political party, I can't speak for Republicans. Personally, I don't see how ramping up armaments to control an empire around the world is conducive to freedom at home.
And I think Mr. Embry did a good job of explaining why 17 year-olds should not automatically be granted full autonomy over their educations--especially since most of it is probably being funded by parents, the government, and the school. I want to answer your idea that studying the history of philosophy is "a crutch." Do you really mean to say that every intelligent person should be able to start from scratch, looking around at the world and crafting his own theories based on his 17-22 years of experience? That's perhaps the OPPOSITE of a conservative world view. Sound more like half-baked Randianism. Try doing the same thing with Physics, math, or computer science. The only way one would think this about philosophy would be if one considered it not the pursuit of Truth, but a prolonged dabbling in Opinion. In which case, by all means--make it up as you go along, get the party line from Fox News, and follow the lemmings into the sea.