Rob Franek’s “371 Best Colleges” hits San Diego

Warwick’s Bookstore in La Jolla, CA hosted  Senior Vice-President and Publisher Rob Franek, The Princeton Review’s author of  371 Best Colleges, 2010 Edition one of Franek’s most popular publications for the college-bound set.

Alex Valle and author Rob Franek

Parents and teens filled the store anxious to get advise on how to choose the right college and navigate the application process — a necessary evil these days for any teen who wants to continue their education after high school — from the man who’s done all the leg work for the un-initiated.

Rob conducts over 120,000 interviews with college students and visits campuses to obtain vital information and assess each university’s strengths and weakness in a variety of criteria. From the best value category to the infamous party list of schools, 371 Best Colleges offers inside information difficult to find in any one place.

Dorms, food, weather, teacher-to-student ratios, location, tuition, freshman class profiles, etc. it’s all in one essential book!

Among the many tips Rob shared with nervous parents, I’m going to share this simple, but painfully revealing, exercise he had us do at the beginning of his presentation (this was tailored to California applicants):

Write down your top ten colleges.

Now, cross out the Ivy Leagues, UC schools, and USC.

Also, cross out Arizona State and NYU.

Now, do you have two or three colleges left on your list?

In amazement, the entire room only had between these exact numbers of schools left on the list. Why? It’s simple. We’re all applying to the same schools.

Not surprisingly, we left the presentation bewildered and carrying the voluminous book because a change in game plan was now necessary.

If you’re in this same panic-stricken stage of the college application process, it behooves you to get this weighty tome pronto! It will save you many tedious hours of surfing the net to find out stuff (besides the academic requirements to get in to your first-choice college) like which school has the best food or housekeeping included in the dorms.

Thank you Rob!