YOU HAVE NO USE for this book now, and quite possibly you never had, but as soon as you see a copy you'll grab it and turn to page 177. You'll find come a few statistics you probably already know. Male/female ratio of 65:35; average SAT scores of 700 verbal, 675 math--you get the idea.

Then there are three items with stars after them: academics, social, and Q of L. Academics has five stars; a quick check at the key in the front of the book reveals, as you expected, that five is as high as this scale goes. Social has three stars, which is vaguely distressing. Only average? All those parties and movies and clubs and rap sessions late into the night--that's a mediocre social life? Worse than Hartwick College, which gets four stars? Another quick trip to the key proves reassuring the social rating, it says, "is primarily a judgement about the amount of social life that is readily available. It can be assumed that a college with a rating of four or five is something of a party school.

But the Q of L rating is genuinely worrisome. For "quality of life. Edward B. Fiske, the education editor of the New York Times, has given Harvard four stars out of a possible five. Perhaps there's something in the key about how the full five is undesirable in this catagory too-- "Too perfect a quality of life, we have found, breeds a slothful and apathetic student body..."No such luck: the rating simply gauges whether the colleges are "worthwhile places to spend four years.

Worse yet, guess who runs away with five stars on this one. Brown and Stanford. Then again, both of them have four-star ratings for social life, and you know what that means: they're party schools.

How do Brown and Stanford outdo Harvard in the qualify of undergraduate life God knows there are more than a few ways in which they might Maybe the faculties of those two colleges have office hours. Maybe student at Brown and Stanford is free from the ugly elitism of finals clubs. Maybe the fine and performing arts are supported there in a more than perfunctory way.

But Fiske and his team in their effort to put together a guide to colleges that combines the best features of statistical Barrons-type books and "confidential" guides like the Yale Daily News's lively--and lucrative volume, have settled for a dreary set out of criteria. The discussion of Harvard is typically hackneyed and out of touch with the true pulse of undergraduate life. Harvard's main trouble, we learn, is that its undergraduates are "treated to a philosophy of education that might compassionately be described as laissezfaire." It seems that Harvard sometimes hires professors for their scholarship more than for their teaching ability. Worse than that they're inaccessible to undergraduates. Even with such a tired theme, the Selective Guide staff even has trouble expressing itself clearly. Read this sentence carefully: "Those who envision having coffee and doughnuts with the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith should keep in mind that inaccessibility plagues Harvard professors in roughly inverse proportion to their status."

At this point, you begin to wonder just how Fiske and his staff knew enough about Harvard--or any college. for that matter--to make this kind of generalization. "The Guide is essentially a journalistic effort, "states the introduction, "based on the same kind of reporting that goes into the creation every day of The New York Times newspaper." That reporting evidently includes a set of questionnaires supplemented by campus visits, phone calls, and newspaper articles. But even with the most thorough reporting, strings of generalizations and a numerical rating system seem more appropriate for restaurants than universities.

Perhaps The Selective Guide's worst flaw of all is that after dusting off the college-counselor cliches, and after answering a few conventional questions that fail to capture a college's essential spirit, the essays have a way of ending on a confusingly upbeat note. How is a high school senior supposed to choose among the following:

...as one student explains. "Earlham is like an incubator. All aspects of the environment generate growth."

"Their kick-back style, Frisbees, and flip-flops not withstanding, most [U.C.-San Diego students] are exceptionally serious students. They just happen to prefer beaches as well as books.

In a land of corn. Iowans clearly lend an ear to learning.

But for those with the wit and the stamina to face Morningside Heights anew each day. Columbia provides a solid education and a variety of experiences that few schools can match.

If you prize quality over diversity. you might fit in [at Davidson College]: and if you fit in, you'll probably love it.

Dayton offers time to think and explore and enjoy oneself in the process.

Incidentally, one of the few exceptions to this breed of conclusion is the carefully worded closing line in the essay on Harvard:

Nowhere but Harvard does the identity of the school--its history, its presence, its pretense--intrude so much into the details of [your] life....You will never forget that you are at Harvard.

Sort of like the New York Times, right, Mr. Fiske?