College Review: How To Pick A College; College Review: Inside The Northeast; College Survival Guide

A burgeoning industry has apparently sprung up in the home video for the college bound market. College Review: How to Pick a College features an amiable student host as a bridging narrator between interviews with faculty members and college students. The differences between college and high school, small colleges and sprawling campuses, and rural vs. urban settings are discussed, as well as a wealth of tidbit type info on frats, campus parking, roommates, and some misconceptions (Lie # 2: "Everyone's friendly here.") The student interview format should also make this much easier to watch for interested high school students. College Review: Inside the Northeast uses student interviews to give an overview of twenty northeast colleges ranging in size from Muhlenberg (a small pre-med school) to Boston College. The students talk about social life, sports, course load, etc. Each profile also lists location, application deadlines, male/female ratio, etc. The final title College Survival Guide is a basic guide to entrance exams, choosing a college, selecting a major, admissions, and finances. While there is some usable info here, the framing device of a host, Jon Lystne, fielding questions from the teenage audience and then repeating them for rotating panels of experts has a dumb game-show feel to it which is distracting. Too, the quality of the "experts" varies considerably. Lane Vanderslice from Columbia seems to know his business (even if he can't help delivering it with just a touch of Ivy League snobbishness), but Tom Higgins from Loyola has such a penchant for the word "like" (as in Valleyspeak: "like, you know") that one wonders how he made it into a respectable position at a major college. The first two titles are recommended; the third, while fine as a supplementary title, is not a necessary purchase. (The two College Review titles are available from: KLM Productions, P.O. Box 2, Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07604.) (See COLORADO'S NARROW GAUGE RAILROADS for availability for the College Survival Guide.)