To the editors of The Princeton Review:

 

Your quest for scintillating, inside scoops about the nation’s “best” colleges has once again sacrificed integrity for entertainment.

 

Just this past fall, upon the release of your latest edition, you wrote to college presidents, “We could not have published such a stellar student guide without you!” Indeed, many colleges such as ours have expended already-scarce resources to participate in your review process and ensure that the information we send you is accurate. Many colleges have allowed Princeton Review to survey their students. And yet, over the years, you have consistently printed inaccuracies and misinformation that are harmful to the college-bound students and to the institutions.

 

Last year over 140 Randolph-Macon Woman’s College students completed Princeton Review’s College Student Survey. Student government members spent hours during their busy semester to administer, collect, and return the surveys. And this year, having been burned by descriptions of the College in previous Best Colleges editions and your staff’s unresponsiveness to inaccuracies, we copied the completed surveys so that, in the case of any discrepancies, we would know what our students’ actual responses were. We thought this was especially important, given that one year you almost published Radford University’s information under the College’s name.

 

Ninety-nine percent of R-MWC survey respondents rated campus beauty A or B; 96 percent gave an A or B grade to ease of getting around. Yet in the “Survey Says” sidebar that purports to list topics of agreement among our surveyed students, you list unattractive campus and campus difficult to get around.

 

In the Students Speak Out section, you quote a survey response describing “a registration system that ‘flows like a clogged toilet.’” Your bathroom simile, attributed to one of our students, would be questionable even if it reflected student sentiment, which it does not: 75 percent of respondents graded class registration A or B.

 

This letter is not a matter of sour grapes. Randolph-Macon Woman’s College normally fares quite well in your Best Colleges issue. In recent editions, we have appeared in top 20 lists for beautiful campus, professors bring material to life, professors make themselves accessible, school runs like butter, dorms like palaces, great food, students happy with financial aid, and best academic bang for your buck.

 

What is at issue here is the integrity of your research and the integrity of the data on which you claim your judgments are made. You permit anyone with a campus email address, whether student or not, to complete an on-line survey. Moreover, our experience suggests that what you print has a dubious relationship to the actual data. We have consistently alerted you to inaccuracies and problems with telephone calls and letters. When you and your staff have responded at all, it has been with elaborate assurances and partial information.

 

Your “stellar” book is an inaccurate and irresponsible publication at best. I wonder if other Princeton Review products would stand up any better under scrutiny. Princeton Review trades on its purported knowledge of higher education. Surely it knows that the supreme value of education is attention to the truth.

 

Sincerely,

 

Kathleen Gill Bowman

President