Loren Pope (1910–2008)

My oldest son will be starting his senior year of high school in the fall and has only recently shown an interest in choosing a college. Meanwhile, I’ve been freaking out about it since his sophomore year! One of my friends recommended this book to me. She and her son used it to choose his college a few years ago and he’s been really happy with his choice.

This book explores small liberal arts colleges that you may have never heard of but are still excellent schools. I went to a big state school (Go Mizzou!) so I didn’t know much about how liberal arts colleges worked before reading this book. The book is divided into sections by region – South, Midwest, etc. and there are a handful of colleges included for each. I liked that the write-up for each college was a narrative, not charts and graphs. The author includes quotes from both professors and students about their experiences with the school. I felt like it was a balanced view of the schools with both positives and negatives mentioned.

I learned a lot from this book. Not every college in this book requires a super high GPA or SAT score. Some of them are even “test-optional”, a concept that I hadn’t heard of before. Being smaller schools – it seemed like the average enrollment was somewhere around 3,500 so students get a lot of support at most of these schools. Most have financial aid programs as well. And there are so many different educational philosophies, unlike the fairly standard state school format.

When I bought this book, my son was planning on majoring in linguistics and wanted to study abroad at some point in his college career. Several colleges in this book would be ideal for that. (Note the post-its I used to mark the ones I thought would be the best. There are a lot!) Since then, he’s decided to major in music education and probably will go to a school close to home. However, I have three more kids, including another son who will be starting his junior year in the fall, so I’m glad I read this book. I found it educational and I’m glad I now have a good background on what liberal arts education is all about. Highly recommended.… (mer)

This book has been on my “meaning to read” shelf for nearly 20 years, and I finally got around to it, long after it had any relevance for me or any of my children. Why now? In the previous book I read, I found out that Loren Pope as a young $25/week copy editor for a Washington daily paper convinced Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house for him. Such is the life of a reader, illustrative of the twists and turns my own education took.
Despite the lack of immediate relevance, I’m glad I read it, if only for the paradoxical effect it had. One thing that obviously turned Pope on was for a faculty member at a school he was investigating say: “I wish I had studied here instead of [insert name of big-ticket, well-known research university here].” Yes, that speaks well of the small, lesser-known schools Pope touts. But inversely, it also demonstrates that even at the schools Pope maligns for, in his estimation, cheating their students, it was possible for students there to become the kind of self-directed, life-long-learning educators who became caring teachers at these life-changing schools. So something went right.
In the end, Pope’s message is mixed. Education is, as he maintains, learning how to learn, to critically analyze information, and communicate clearly. In other words, there is a healthy dose of self-directions required. Even if one concedes that the schools Pope highlights promote these and other life-enriching skills in a more conscious, focused way, in the end it is the responsibility of each person to become an educated adult.
Perhaps one reason I put off reading this book is that I share with those faculty members Pope loves quoting a tendency to fantasize how my life would have differed had I made wiser, better-informed decisions about my education 50 years ago, and I was afraid this book would reinforce that. Paradoxically, it did the opposite, and I am more atoned with the places where I ended up, even though they did many things Pope rightly decries. Instead of focusing on this, I appreciated anew things that were right in those less-than perfect learning environments. That is perhaps the lasting value of this book, even though the specific 40 schools featured might have changed again had Pope lived to do a third edition, as they did in his second. Despite the repetitive nature of the entries, and the tiresomely-zippy nature of an ex-journalist’s prose, Pope thinks hard about what an institute of higher learning could and should be. He challenges prospective students and their parents to look beyond schools with big reputations and commensurate price tags and to think like consumers. There is no one school perfect for everyone, and there is a big payoff in analyzing not only schools but oneself in the interest of a better match-up.
For all the diversity in the 40 schools Pope covers, what he writes of one applies to his estimation of all: “a growth hormone that raises kids’ trajectories and instills the power to soar. The Ivies take in fast-track kids and turn out fast-track graduates not much changed.” I’m not sure that it’s necessary to run down the Ivies to praise these schools; I believe the college experience anywhere profoundly changes nearly everyone. Pope’s favorite high school student seems to be the B or even C student with middling SATs who blossoms unexpectedly because of the experience at one of these lesser-known schools that are both challenging and nurturing. He never mentions students such as I was, with indifferent grades, poor study habits, but astronomical SATs at a fast-track high school. Where should I have gone, Mr. Pope? Maybe St. John’s, but if you ask tomorrow, I might say Marlboro or Bard. In the end, it doesn’t matter.
The specific recommendations might change. What doesn’t is this: Pope highlights the things good schools do well, giving the reader the tools to make a better-informed choice. In the process, he helps us all think about the nature of education. Recommended for anyone interested in the question of quality in higher education.
A final note: I didn’t read the second edition, but the first (1996), and it contained one of the most delicious typos I’ve encountered in a while, when he cites the author of a best-selling philosophy textbook, “Attacking Faculty Reasoning.”… (mer)

What I liked about the way Loren Pope approached colleges was that there was no "one-size fits all" school. Having a few kids approaching college-age, we want to look at the child and what the school have in common--rather than just applying to the schools that are in our area. It takes a lot of thinking, talking, digging, etc. to find the right match of student & school and I like that the author takes the time to rate what each school does well. It cuts down on some of the homework we parents have to do.… (mer)

Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Colleges You Should Know About Even if You Aren’t a Straight-A Student by Loren Pope. Epiphany-OviedoELCA library section: 12 F, Teen, Planning Your Future. What makes these colleges so excellent that they change lives? They are collaborative rather than competitive, and have low faculty-student ratios and small classes. Many of these colleges look for high school students “in the rough,” with average SAT scores, who, with a little guidance and individual attention, will blossom into wonderful contributors to society. Some of these schools are just overlooked, yet have much to offer.
The schools are divided into regions of the country to make it easier to see which schools are in your general area. Did you know that “Civil War” director Ken Burns’ alma mater, Hampshire college in Massachusetts, has a film school to rival UCLA’s? Who knew that Guilford College, a Quaker school in North Carolina, has one of the best oil geology majors in the nation, or that Agnes Scott, a women’s college in Atlanta is great for economics or biology because of its close proximity to both a Federal Reserve branch and the Centers for Disease Control? A word of caution: the author rates these schools so consistently highly that you’ll have to read some other college guides to get a more balanced view.
Some of these schools have lower costs, and offer scholarships which make them very competitive in price, or even cheaper, than Big State U. Many of these schools prefer to accept a teen with an 1150 SAT rather than one with a 1350, who they believe will choose a more selective school anyway. In return your teen gets individualized attention, small “live” classes rather than video-streamed classes with hundreds of students (common at large state colleges), real input in her choice of studies, and friendly fellow students. Who wouldn’t blossom in that kind of atmosphere?… (mer)