Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges Author: Visit Amazon's Loren Pope Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0143122304 | Format: EPUB
Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges Description
Review
"Smart and credible."
(The New York Times)
About the Author
Loren Pope (1910-2008) was education editor of the New York Times in the 1950s. In 1965 he opened the College Placement Bureau in Washington, D.C., to help families of college-bound students make informed choices. He was also the author of Looking Beyond the Ivy League and wrote numerous articles about the college application process.
Hilary Masell Oswald lives in Denver, Colorado, where she writes about education, architecture and design, and public policy. Her work has appeared in Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, Edutopia, and other publications and websites.
- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Revised edition (August 28, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0143122304
- ISBN-13: 978-0143122302
- Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
If you ever hanker to think that your child may have been better off going to that school whose name everyone knows, pull out this book and read the first 20 pages and you will become instantly relaxed.
In a nutshell, Pope espouses that liberal arts undergraduate education in the Ivies is faltering, if not failing, but America has plenty of great liberal arts educational centers and they are at the numerous well established liberal arts colleges (LAC's) of America. Those LAC's and some "other" LAC's are great places for undergraduate education. Some of those "other" LAC's are the topic of this book.
This is the old book (Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even If You're Not a Straight-A Student) with quips at the end of the 40 schools which update his research of each respective institution. He has added passages at the end of the 40 schools to describe what has happened at some of the schools which makes his statement(s) of a decade ago as true or even truer than when originally written. In short, the LAC's of this book are not only still good schools, most are better schools than when he delivered their names in the original book.
He writes well. He is very persuasive. And, in the end, his arguments clearly show each school's strength through his writing skills and by the statistics recited throughout this book.
If you want more, there are two others on this same line of reasoning:
This is basically a guide to sometimes `overlooked' colleges. As such, its short write-ups on those colleges could prove useful to potential students. Many of the colleges named are fine institutions. Thus, this is one book among many that High School juniors and their parents might wish to consult. The financial information, however, is hit-and-miss. Tuition and fees, room/board costs and scholarship resources are likely to be important to readers and this book is spotty with regard to those details. Much of the material is anecdotal and while that is always vivid and potentially helpful it runs the risk of being unrepresentative. The book's material on applicant pools, average SAT scores, acceptance and retention rates and so on is also hit-and-miss. My advice to potential students would be to begin with a large source book or data set that includes the financial, statistical, geographic, programmatic and demographic information in which they might be interested, then home in on a large number of schools. After that you can turn to books like Pope's which give information on the texture and ethos of a given institution. Then it's time for campus interviews, discussions with enrolled students, and closer, more personal examination.
Pope's book, it should be noted, has strong biases. His preference is for small institutions that are student-centered, i.e., institutions in which the faculty are principally teachers and not researchers, institutions in which the ethos is very `personal'. By and large, the institutions on which he focuses are less prestigious ones, institutions that `really want you' and will `really appreciate you'.
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