25 Hottest Schools College Guide: It's that time of year again, when high-school seniors and their parents gear up for the admissions game. In excerpts from our annual newsstand issue, here's what you need to know about the newest trends.

Erin Patrice O'Brien for Newsweek Hottest Ivy: Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., emphasizes problem-solving as well as scholarly debate

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - Like shoes, cars, Web sites and stars tracked by paparazzi, good colleges go in and out of fashion. Whether they're mentioned more often, or less often, in any given year has little to do with their inherent qualities. A big state university with a powerhouse engineering department or a tiny private college with an English department known for its poets will retain those assets a long time, even if they're not always part of the buzz at education conferences. Ethereal as this rise and fall of interest may be, it has benefits. As fashions change, one feature that was just a bullet point in a good school's brochure becomes a top attraction: the coming of a presidential election will help spotlight one college's emphasis on political science. Growing dissatisfaction with standardized tests can awaken interest in a school that long ago decided not to require the SAT or the ACT. Our new list of the nation's hottest colleges should be seen in this light as subjective and temporary—but in a good way.

Subjective also means this isn't an official ranking. You may have heard this past spring that an organization of liberal-arts colleges called the Annapolis Group issued a statement saying some member schools would stop participating in the part of the U.S. News & World Report's annual survey in which college administrators assess peer schools using a numerical system. The move was a reaction to a longstanding controversy about the usefulness of numerical listings that order institutions by how they fare on a range of statistical measures. Critics say these measures don't give a full picture of a school. Instead of a numerical ranking, our list is a quick but colorful snapshot of today's most interesting schools. We've talked to a range of experts—admissions officials, educational consultants, students, parents, and college and university leaders—in making our selections. We've been particularly influenced by the views of high-school counselors, the people most in tune with what matters to the latest wave of college applicants.

Some of these schools are large. Some are tiny. Some charge more than $40,000 a year and some only a tenth that amount. Some are celebrated, but one was completely unknown to us and several experts we consulted until a well-traveled counselor pointed it out. All the schools have strong programs that can change young lives for the better. Being hot for the moment is as good an excuse as any for applicants to see if one of them might be just right for them.

Hottest Ivy
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell is a land-grant college emphasizing problem solving as well as scholarly debate. The university boasts a world-class engineering college and top-flight liberal arts, science and fine arts. The hotel school is considered the world's best. Cornellians, proud of the variety on campus, point to the president, David Skorton, a cardiologist, jazz musician and computer scientist who is the first in his family to have a college education.

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