Choosing a College Lifestyle

College Prowler uses student-driven surveys and quotes to assemble rankings and guides to the top 100 colleges in the U.S., which isn't so revolutionary, but they do have an interesting business model. What really rings true for me was that they do their college rankings with actual lifestyle concerns like the attractiveness, ratio and approachability of the girls on campus (and guys too, of course).

They've got some of the usual stuff (academics and sports) you'd see in all of the other college data sites out there, but they've clued in to how kids will increasingly make their college selections -- by trying to envision what kind of lifestyle they'd be able to have there. They want trustworthy first-person accounts of the weather, drug scene (in a all-drugs-are-bad sort of way, but I'm sure you could read it both ways), nightlife, and the local atmosphere around the campus, along with piles of other lifestyle factors that kids will actually care about.

So maybe prospective college students are getting smarter about aligning their choice of college with their desired lifestyle...now if only more of them could figure out why they were going to college in the first place.