One year ago, Carly Jurman ’11 was deciding which college to attend. Jurman, like many others, began her college application process with a Princeton Review guidebook. Quotes in the review such as, “lots of class discussions” and “an extremely social school” attracted her to Fairfield.
Each year, thousands of students, similar to Jurman, and their parents use guidebooks such as The Princeton Review in the college application process. Annually, The Princeton Review has thousands of college students complete surveys about the schools they attend.
These comments, on both academic and social life at the schools, potentially appear in the “Students Say” profiles on PrincetonReview.com and in The Princeton Review college guidebooks. The survey is currently available on Fairfield’s Students 411 Web site .
The publication’s influence may sway initial opinions about schools among prospective students and their parents, but there is no way to determine how accurately the surveys represent the schools.
The rankings in the 2008 edition are based on surveys of 120,000 students (about 325 per campus) at the 366 schools included in the book (not at all the schools in the nation). The surveys were completed during the 2006-2007 year and the previous two school years, according to The Princeton Review.
James Shanahan, professor and chair of the communication department at Fairfield, said that if The Princeton Review’s survey was a scientific poll, it would include information such as whether the respondents were self-selected or randomly selected, the respondents’ demographic and academic performance, as well as the overall response rate.
Neither The Princeton Review nor Fairfield provides information on how many students, on average, fill out the surveys as well as demographic and academic breakdowns.
According to Jennifer Adams, student survey manager at The Princeton Review, they “don’t report school-specific survey response numbers or demographic data about our respondents.”
Nancy Habetz, director of media relations at Fairfield said: “We have no information on which students responded. We have no reason to think they would be representative of the [student] body or they wouldn’t.”
The Princeton Review is clear about its methodology for surveying students, which is stated on the Web site.
“Our survey is qualitative and anecdotal rather than quantitative. In order to guard against producing a write-up that’s off the mark for any particular college, we send our administrative contact at each school a copy of the profile we intend to publish with ample opportunity to respond with corrections, comments, and/or outright objections,” it says.
Since the survey is qualitative, there is no way to determine whether the student interviews are truly representative of a college.
“It seems as if they are trying to protect themselves by saying that the survey is ‘anecdotal,’ yet they do report numerical rankings for various qualities,” said Shanahan.
Kurt Schlichting, professor and chair of sociology and anthropology, said, “This could reflect the comment of one student the writer encountered on one random day at one random location on campus.”
Schlichting said that Fairfield and the other universities cited in the Review are caught in a dilemma: being included among the “best” schools is advantageous, but the school is open to the editors’ decisions to include any provocative comments.
“The guidebooks serve as a ‘screening’ mechanism. However, when the final decision to attend is made, the guidebooks have less importance,” said Schlichting.
Fairfield’s admissions officers recommend that prospective students use the admissions publications and University Web site for information about Fairfield, and can choose to gather information from any of the guidebooks that are in the market.
Well into second semester at Fairfield, Jurman said she now has an accurate idea of the student body on campus.
Now that she is aware how the survey is conducted, she said, “I think I would have been a little more careful about trusting the Review so much in my decision-making process, but I still think that the Review says a lot right on the nose about the school.”
“What I read in the Princeton Review books was really accurate. Everything about the curriculum is true, especially what they say about having well-rounded students, as well as small class sizes that are big on discussion,” she added.
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