Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges Author: Loren Pope | Language: English | ISBN:
143528237X | Format: EPUB
Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges Description
The landmark college guide that introduces forty of the best colleges you've never heard of—now completely revised and updated
Choosing the right college has never been more important—or more difficult. For the latest edition of this classic college guide, Hilary Masell Oswald conducted her own tours of top schools and in-depth interviews, building on Loren Pope's original to create a totally updated, more expansive work. Organized by geographic region, every profile includes a wealth of vital information, including admissions standards, distinguishing facts about the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and what faculty say about their jobs. Masell Oswald also offers a new chapter on how students with learning disabilities can find schools that fit their needs. For every prospective college student searching for more than football and frat parties, Colleges That Change Lives will prove indispensable.
Fully revised and updated by education journalist Hilary Oswald, Colleges That Change Lives remains the definite guide for high school students (and their parents) who are looking for more in their college education than football, frat parties, and giant lectures. Building on the foundation of landmark author Loren Pope, Oswald spent more than a year visiting 40 colleges, speaking with students, faculty, and alumni to create these vivid and concise portraits.
Featuring a new introduction, a new Required Reading section, and a new chapter on learning disabilities, the book is organized into five geographic regions (Northeast, South, Midwest, Southwest, Northwest) to make for easy browsing, and urban, suburban, and rural campuses are all featured. There’s also an alphabetical index of colleges. Each profile includes admissions standards as well as relevant statistics to make your decision easier, including where the school ranks in post-graduate grants and fellowships, what percentage of students go on to graduate school or further education, distinguishing facts about the curriculum, percentage of professors who have terminal degrees in their field, even what activities are available to students and what they’re likely to do on weekends.
From the look and feel of the campus, quality of dining hall food and extracurriculars to the percentage of students who study abroad, average SAT scores, and educational philosophy, Oswald anticipates the questions you’ll have and provides the answers (and if you want to know more, there’s a section with contact information for every profiled school). You might not heard of many of these schools, but after reading Colleges That Change Lives you’ll be dying to visit yourself.
With more than 150,000 copies sold and 24 printings, Colleges That Change Lives remains the definite college guide book for discerning students. Whether you’ve got straight A's and have always known you’ll go on to higher education or you’ve got a mediocre transcript but suddenly find yourself interested in college, this is the book for you.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Library Binding: 382 pages
- Publisher: Paw Prints 2008-05-22; Reprint edition (May 22, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 143528237X
- ISBN-13: 978-1435282377
- Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 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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