Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You

 (35 customer reviews)

The two books by Loren Pope changed the way we looked at college for our daughter and led to successful admission with generous financial aide with a school we would have overlooked. As caring parents who spent too many years connected to higher education, (mostly at large schools), these two books redirected the college search towards smaller, nurturing liberal arts colleges that also provide merit based financial aide; no longer did we consider college factories or schools with unjustified high reputations without commensurate attention to teaching. Of the 12(!)College guides we read, the two from Loren Pope were the best and directly changed our daughter's life for the better. These are a must read.

Mr. Pope has a contrarian philosophy of higher education based on his career long inside knowledge as a college counselor. In his view, Ivy leagues are way over rated. Their reputation is perpetrated by the college rankings of U.S. News. According to Mr. Pope, such rankings are almost irrelevant as they don't measure in any way the quality of education provided to the students by such schools. But, they reinforce the reputation of schools which drive up application numbers, which in turn allows these "top" schools to become increasingly selective, and further boosts their U.S. News ranking. For Mr. Pope this is a self reinforcing not so virtuous cycle. Mr. Pope instead recommends to look at the multitude of excellent small liberal arts college located in the Midwest, South, and West that are not so well known. Because they are less well known, their respective acceptance rates are way higher than for their better known counterparts back East and the Ivy league. Yet, they...Read more

Haven't written reviews here before, but seeing with delight that this book is still around I had to write one. I read this book midway through my junior year of high-school and, struck by the sensible and sound reasoning that informs every argument, I applied to a completely different set of schools than I initially considered. Ultimately I feel I profited invaluably from attending a small liberal-arts college instead of a big brand name: I was going through a lot of troubles, and the individual attention and support I was able to obtain from small departments, small classes, and concerned and caring professors (even outside of my major) allowed me to find my inner strengths and embark on a life path I would not have dreamed of when I first arrived at college. Now how many of my friends who went to big-name research universities can say that? Thanks, Mr. Pope.