Antidotes for Anguish

As the demand for higher education rises faster than schools can supply it, the college applicant's Anguish Quotient keeps climbing too. "Who gets into college, and where, is a national dilemma that has much of America close to an epileptic fit," says Tufts University Dean of Admissions John C. Palmer, guidance committee chairman of the mighty College Entrance Board. An immediate cure for the problem is clearly impossible, but a variety of useful antidotes that offer quick partial relief have come on the market.

> A group of leading Boston-area educators have devised a $4.75 College Finding Service Kit that uses computers to narrow a student's possible choices.

The kit, developed by the nonprofit Educational Research Corporation of Cambridge, relies on the programmed profiles of 2,850 schools that are stored in IBM machines. A-student marks his preferences (location, size, competitive standing, desired subjects) on a four-page booklet; the information is fed into the computer and out clatter the printed names of schools that match his demands. Average "print-out": between 20 and 30 colleges.

> Guidance Associates of Pleasantville, N.Y., produces sight-and-sound film strips of 70 colleges now used by one-third of the 25,000 high schools in the U.S. In addition to saving parents the expense of campus visits, the films spare guidance counselors the hundreds of hours they used to spend in giving descriptions of schools they never visited.

> The Comparative Guide to American Colleges, by James Cass and Max Birnbaum ($8.95; paperback, $3.95), is a recently published ambitious consumer's guide to 1,132 colleges, with descriptions that are fair, yet frank, avoiding the dishonesty and exaggeration of some school catalogues and the dry statistical shorthand of other compilations.

It details admission standards, thus helping students eliminate wasted applications, and goes on to describe the academic environment at each college so that applicants will not learn too late whether a school is intellectually lazy, rigorous, or so tough that the dropout rate is alarmingly high. Cass and Birnbaum examined such matters as the number of full professors in a department to judge its real strength, rated the faculty by the quality of schools where they got advanced degrees, discovered solid and improving regional colleges that are anxious to acquire a national student body. Campus religious and social life was investigated as carefully as intellectual standards on the theory that the chief stimulus for student achievement comes from other students.

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