Eschewed Obfuscation

Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges
by Loren Pope
382 pages (trade paperback)
Genre: Nonfiction/Self-Help/College

I kept hearing about CTCL schools in my arcane Internet researches, so I decided to finally read Pope's famous book. It was interesting and very different from the norm in college guides; only 40 schools are profiled, as the title suggests, and each receives a long (5-7 pages) essay extolling its virtues. While I subscribe to the principle that prestige is worth very little, and I generally agree with Pope, I do think his method of persuasion is flawed. He writes almost nothing negative about any of the 40 colleges, so that they seem like bastions of perfection. Also, he wastes breath (or space, I suppose) reviling the elite schools--certainly they aren't perfect, but neither are they terrible, and a bit more endowment goes a long way in terms of financial aid and campus quality of life.

Nonetheless, this was a fascinating read and one that I recommend as a matter of course.