The Best 392 Colleges, 2027. By Robert Franek, David Soto, Stephen Koch, Aaron Riccio, Laura Rose, and the staff of The Princeton Review. Princeton Review/Penguin Random House. $26.99.
Consistency seems an increasingly rare commodity these days, which makes it all the more valuable when it is present. That reality alone speaks to the importance of The Princeton Review’s almost-900-page annual guide to the “best” colleges. Whatever “best” means – the word itself is inconsistently applied. That, however, is a good thing where this guidebook is concerned, since the imprecision of the definition is precisely what families need when considering what colleges a soon-to-be-attendee should consider. Whatever your definition of “best” may be where college is concerned, you can use it to narrow down the available choices presented with so much data in this hefty volume.
Narrowing down is crucial. The first decision families need to make is whether a high-school graduate should continue into college at all. A few years ago, when this series was younger (it has now been around for 35 years), that was less likely to be a question, since college education was considered the gateway to future success in career and life. Not so now. Increasingly, teenagers growing up in an interconnected world, in which artificial intelligence and other factors have thoroughly scrambled the employment landscape, are opting for hands-on training – trade schools, apprenticeships, etc. – rather than academe. Whether that particular trend will continue is an open question, but the fact that it exists at all puts The Best 392 Colleges, 2027 in a light different from that shone on its predecessors.
The consistency of the book itself, however, remains. Its section called “Great Schools for 22 of the Most Popular Undergraduate Majors” is an excellent place to start for students who do want to attend college and think they know where they want to focus. That is a somewhat rarefied group, to be sure, especially as professional landscapes shift, but those who expect to major in accounting, business, computer science, education, history, political science and more will find alphabetical lists here that they can use to help pinpoint where they want to go in the specific listings and discussions given to colleges within the main portion of the book. There is nothing judgmental about the lists: journalism, a fading profession, gets its due, with 50 listed colleges, and artificial intelligence, a rapidly growing area of concentration, gets its as well, with 32 listings. None of the lists is exhaustive, of course, and the colleges within them are not exclusive to a single list: University of Georgia and University of Southern California, for example, appear for both AI and journalism. But the “focus” lists are a fine starting point for a search that can then be narrowed in many ways – for instance, by using the book’s separate rankings of schools that students rate as tops in categories including quality of life, campus life, social scene and other elements of higher education (and yes, including academics as one category).
The ratings by students are key here. The Princeton Review compiles its lists through surveys, with this year’s book assembled from the responses of 172,000 students. Some of the comments culled from those responses appear on the two pages devoted to every school in the main section of the book: each such section opens with a “Students Say” subhead and also includes “The Princeton Review Says” and “The School Says” (this last being an opportunity for some school-generated public relations, whose orientation and quality may give families pause: how many times can you stand to read about schools’ avowed “holistic approach,” expectation of “curiosity,” networking opportunities, “challenging and innovative” environment, and other PR-speak?). The schools are presented alphabetically in the main portion of the book, for ease of reference after families start to narrow down their search, but a back-of-the-book section on geographical location may be worth using before going to the book’s main section if the potential student prefers to study in a specific state or region. Thanks to this book’s layout, a student who can pre-identify both an area of focus and a preferred region in which to study is well ahead of the game.
In fact, it is the front-of-book and back-of-book lists and focuses that have in recent times proven to be consistently the most valuable elements of these yearly guides. It is all well and good to go to the two-page spread for a particular college for statistics on its student body, academics, mental-health services, selectivity and financial requirements and expectations – but deciding which two-page spreads to visit is what really matters. And that requires sorting the overwhelming data set according to a student’s or family’s specific interests, concerns and needs – something the book itself of course cannot do. So if the cost of attendance, for example, is going to be a significant factor because it will be paid out of pocket without financial aid, then turning to “Index of Schools by Tuition” is a smart move for narrowing down the possible choices. The Best 392 Colleges, 2027 even offers a list that goes beyond its own pages: “2027 Best Regional Colleges” gives a location-based listing of 238 “schools that we consider academically outstanding and well worth consideration” even though details on them are not provided. So there is yet another sorting-and-focusing opportunity among the many available here.
Interestingly, this ongoing series shows its consistency in one amusing way as well as many serious ones: its numbering keeps going up by one. This year we have The Best 392 Colleges, 2027, after having 391 colleges in the 2026 edition, 390 in 2025, and in fact increasing by one every year since the number stood at 385 in 2020. It is all a bit silly, really, but does seem to indicate an inexorable march toward 400, which at this rate will be reached in the 2035 edition. The Princeton Review apparently anticipates continuing consistency for quite some time – which, on the evidence of this book and its predecessors, it is indeed likely to deliver.
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