Looking Beyond The Ivy League [Paperback]

I still have some issues with Mr. Pope's small (some might say tiny) school bias. At least here he provides more background as to why he believes what he believes. And the list of schools (though lacking in any depth), does contain a lot of larger (5000+) schools.

If nothing else, Mr. Pope's two books are important -- they were pretty much the first books to take on the "Ivy League or Bust" mentality that seemed to mushroom out of control in the 60's and 70's. For that alone he deserves praise -- just take some of his diatribes with a grain of salt.

Garbage for pumpkin heads.

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 often provide a just as good if not superior college education. Their professors are fully dedicated to teaching undergraduates. This is unlike in the Ivy league whose professors are more dedicated to research, publication, consulting, and PhD candidates.

The above concepts are really mind opening and powerful. Where Mr. Pope's book falls short, is that his data is more than 20 years out of date. This is difficult to overlook or forgive given that he "updated" his book in 1995, yet his data covers the period from 1951 to 1980. So, at the time of the book's second publication, this book's data was already 15 years out of date. One has to wonder why he did not bother to update the data. It would have made his book so much better.

With outdated data Mr. Pope inevitably makes many embarassing college recommendations. Many of the schools he is so crazy about, are now really poor educational performers that should have been screened out of any truly updated edition of this book. As an example, Antioch College in Ohio has a really poor freshman retention rate of 66%. This is the lowest freshman retention rate I have come across in my researching colleges. Similarly, in his other related book "Colleges that Change Lives" after doing some research, I screened out 20 of the 40 mentioned (or 50%) because of either low freshman retention rate, low graduation rate, and low percentage of graduates going on to graduate schools.