Since my daughter is a high school sophomore, we've started the whole "Let's search for the perfect college!" thing with a vengeance. While I wouldn't recommend using BEST COLLEGES 2014 as your sole research, it's a decent companion to some of the other college books out there and does a particularly nice job of organizing different sets of schools. Living in California, for example, it was helpful to see regional schools for our area and we were particularly interested in how various public universities stacked up. There will always be considerable debate when ranking schools in numerical order (and I certainly wouldn't obsess over whether a school was 1st, 10th or 15th on these kinds of lists), but it does give you a group of highly regarded schools, which I believe is important. The book really reads like an extremely extensive magazine (not so shocking, considering it is put out by U.S. News & World Report) and also contains a number of shorter, introductory articles on useful topics like finding the right campus, the right college experience for your student, picking a major that is more likely to lead to gainful employment after graduation, etc. ( )