Life Before the Preppies

By Richard Lacayo

A guide presents salty summaries of 186 colleges

Four years after collaborating on The Official Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach has returned with a prequel: life before Bif and Muffy get the desk and mortgage. Lisa Birnbach's College Book runs down--sometimes literally--186 American schools. "I realized that there wasn't a single college guide that described life on campus," she recalls, "at least not the things that interested me."

What interests her are dorms, bars, amusements and sexual mores, as well as academics. According to the Birnbach report, Animal House was not such an exaggeration after all: at the University of Texas, "hazing is still popular; people get beaten up, raped, and just love it." Interracial dating at the University of Nebraska? "White sorority girls love to squeal, 'Once you go black, you never go back.' "

Birnbach (Brown '78) bases her insights on more than rumor; she visited every campus in the book. Ducking into bars, attending the odd class, she sought students, professors and administrators, and distributed nine-page questionnaires. "I stayed in dorms," she declares in the tone of a war correspondent. "I ate cafeteria food every day."

The result of her 2 1/2-year effort is a 515-page survey that covers a lot more than the standard data. She ventures into exotic territory like "Favorite Drugs," 'Most Popular Off-Campus Hangout" and "Best Party of the Year," then considers: Who are the best professors? How good is the campus infirmary?

Birnbach's effort has received mixed grades. Her mostly favorable description of Amherst strikes its public affairs director, Douglas Wilson, as "fair enough," and her in-person approach gets praise from W.W. Washburn, head of admissions at the University of Washington. But other administrators award her a D--. A spokesman for Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., charges that factual errors in Birnbach's treatment of his school are "just appalling." William Cotter, president of Colby College in Maine, fumes, "I can't get over how superficial and sloppy the Colby entry is."

The critics may not get the joke, but they have a point. Her sampling techniques were less than impressive and some of her generalizations seem based on insufficient authority. (Many Purdue students, she states, "drink, and drink heavily.") Other conclusions seem applicable to just about any place but are offered as the lowdown on particular institutions. (Parents of the students at Northwestern are "directly responsible" for pushing their children in particular career paths.) Even so, Birnbach's guide performs a certain service by focusing more than other volumes on what students should expect outside the classroom and off the campus. Moreover, she maintains, "I wrote up a lot of schools that otherwise wouldn't be heard of. That can only benefit them, no matter what I said."

Robert Dawson, assistant to the president at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, takes a broad view. "Students consider a variety of opinions before choosing a college," he says. "If I didn't have that much faith in 18-year-olds, I wouldn't be here."

--By Richard Lacayo. Reported by Kenneth Banta/New York

With reporting by Kenneth Banta/New York