(MONEY Magazine) – Every year, colleges publish viewbooks teeming with four-color pictures of lawns, lakes and lolling students. Some facts are available too, such as home states of students and the number of volumes in the library. There's even a movement under way to require colleges to reveal on-campus crime statistics. Yet few of these facts aid candidates and parents in comparing similar colleges. Indeed, most people have more useful information about buying used cars than they do about a service that can cost up to $75,000 over four years.

What kind of information might be useful to parents and students? Here is a list of questions you might begin with. If the applicant is shy about aggressive grilling, parents should feel free to pose such questions to admissions officers by mail or by phone, or even during campus visits. Be warned that only some of them will be answered. But be assured that considering the cost in time and money involved, all of them should be. What are the admissions standards for different groups? The most selective private colleges build classes composed of scholars, minorities, offspring of alumni, athletes, development cases (those whose parents are loaded), students with a specific academic expertise and youngsters with special creative talents. Standards vary not only by group but also by separate schools -- arts and sciences, engineering and business, say -- at the same university. To give candidates an estimate of their chances, colleges should provide information about the number of applicants in each group and for each school, the number that was admitted, and the average Standard Aptitude Test score within each. At one Ivy League university, for instance, the combined SAT average for the freshman class several years ago was 1350. But in the engineering school, the SAT average was 1380; for Asian-Americans, 1350; for children of alumni, 1280; for athletes, 1240; for development cases, 1220; for blacks, 1200; and for Hispanics, 1180. Admissions officers will likely be willing to provide SAT breakdowns by schools within a university but not for types of student. The contentious fallout from the release of such sensitive data could be considerable. But ask anyway: you may get a straight answer. What are your specific admissions policies? Most college catalogues say something such as: ''Incomparable College is looking for highly motivated, intellectually curious students who want to pursue a rigorous program of studies.'' It will not be easy to get any college to be more direct. For one thing, it is difficult to write an admissions-policy statement without offending someone. For another, without written guidelines, the college administration can change the composition of the classes depending upon the needs of the hour. After bitter internal debate that spilled over into the newspapers, for instance, Trinity University in San Antonio this year shifted from a ''need blind'' admissions policy to one of ''parents' ability to pay.'' Yet many admissions offices employ rating systems that might be made useful to candidates. Princeton, for example, uses a one-to-five system, with candidates rated separately for academics and nonacademics. Ask admissions officers to tell you which credentials will weigh more heavily. This will give the candidates something to shoot for. What is your graduation rate? This is a rough measure of consumer satisfaction with the institution. Only 47% of those who start college eventually earn a degree -- from any school. Be skeptical if a private college lost more than 15% and a public college over 25% of a class in the first two years, or if the independent college did not graduate 75% of a class and if the public institution did not graduate 60%. It would be interesting for colleges to publish charts showing what percentage of each class flunked out, was dismissed for disciplinary reasons, left for financial reasons, transferred to other institutions or simply departed. What is the real success rate of the college's graduates in postgraduate admissions? It's one thing to say that x% of a particular class goes on to law school and y% goes on to medical school, but a more helpful measure of the intellectual development of the student body would be statistics on how many applied but were not admitted anywhere, and the ranges and median scores of all the undergraduates who took the various standardized tests for graduate schools. How much do undergraduates use the library? Most colleges boast only about the number of volumes there. Other leading indicators: What percentage of the undergraduate student body can the library's seating accommodate at any one time? Are any carrels assigned to undergraduates and, if so, what percentage of the senior class has them? What is the average number of books checked out a year by each undergraduate? - How ambitious are your computer facilities? Because computers will play a significant role in the professional and personal lives of today's students, it is helpful to know what the institutions are doing to make them available to undergraduates. Are students required to have personal computers? Are they given reasonable access to the school's mainframe with terminals placed strategically around the campus? Colleges could easily publish a terminal- student ratio. At Duke, where there are only 420 terminals to some 6,000 undergraduates, the university administration says it wants to right the imbalance. How accessible are the athletic and recreational facilities? College viewbooks are as full of pictures of impressive indoor and outdoor sports centers as they are silent about the amount of time these Taj Mahals are available to the nonintercollegiate athlete. All you need is a listing of all the facilities and the hours when the usage was restricted for intercollegiate teams, for intramural programs and for recreational use. All too often, 95% of the undergraduates get to use the best facilities only as spectators. Do students get to take the courses they want? It is not uncommon for undergraduates to select courses only to find them already closed out. It isn't easy to fathom how the colleges have been able to get away with this practice when tuition costs require such great sacrifices by families. There may be good reason for limiting some classes, especially when there is restricted lab space. But many of the class-size limits appear to be arbitrarily imposed by individual faculty members. Colleges should publish a list of courses that have limited enrollments, identifying both the number of students who requested those classes and the number who actually enrolled. If colleges were required to do this, the number of limited-enrollment courses might drop dramatically. Do undergraduates get a chance to study with seasoned professors? Faculties are ranked as follows: professors, associate professors, assistant professors, instructors and teaching assistants. Applicants and their parents should not be reluctant to inquire about the average amount of weekly time those at each rank devote to teaching undergraduates. While most colleges profess to being committed to undergraduate education, actual evidence of the extent of that commitment is difficult to find. If a youngster sees that full professors at one institution spend nine hours a week teaching while their counterparts at another teach only four, the candidate might legitimately question the amount of attention he or she is likely to receive at the latter school. At the University of Pennsylvania, admissions officers are willing to provide such data. Fewer than 10% of Penn's introductory undergraduate courses are taught by teaching assistants, for example, and most of those are science labs. Students are attracted to many major universities by the reputations of superstar faculty members. Those who are not expected to teach undergraduates should be so designated in the catalogue. Colleges should list not only those on their faculty who have been recognized for outstanding work but also the courses they teach -- if any. A famous professor's mere presence on campus is no help to a student and cold comfort to a family whose home may be in hock in the elusive pursuit of higher education.