The Insider's Guide to the Colleges

The Insider's Guide to the Colleges is a college educational guide which has been published annually by the student editorial staff of the Yale Daily News for over three decades. It provides insight to prospective undergraduate students using first-hand accounts of attending students as well as an overview of the admissions process.

This guidebook offers information about 323 American Institutions of Higher Education. It includes information about public universities, private universities, and liberal arts colleges from all regions of the United States.

Information about each college and university is gathered entirely from student interviews. The editors (students themselves) note that their

primary objective is to paint an accurate picture of what day-to-day life is like for college students at each school. In each write-up, we rely on hours of personal interviews with actual college students [...] we research each school in The Insider's Guide, by interviewing friends, friends of friends, and a random selection of students at each school. This gives The Insider's Guide a unique perspective from students whose opinions we trust. It also means that we are only as accurate as our sources. Though we have worked hard to make each article factually correct and current, the college experience is unique for every individual. (1)

The editors also offer what they refer to as the "College Finder" or "Top Ten Lists." [1] Of the methodology used to create these lists they note,

while our top ten lists use a mix of statistics and subjectivity to provide an alternative perspective on the schools we include, we have avoided the temptation to pigeonhole the colleges with some kind of catch-all rating system or worse, to numerically rank them from first to last. Our reason is that the 'best' college for one person may come near the bottom of the list for another. (4-5)

The guide offers an overview of the entire application process including college visits and the application process (including the interview). It also offers a chapter called "The College Spectrum" which offers suggested areas of consideration when choosing a college including size, location, the makeup of a school, whether to choose a professional or liberal arts curriculum and general concerns regarding "quality of life." (34) There is also a section for students with disabilities as well as a glossary of terms related to the admissions process.