Who Needs Harvard?

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To see what a more ecumenical approach to college hunting looks like, you have only to drop in on Pope's Colleges That Change Lives tour, a kind of low-key Lollapalooza for freethinking colleges that are looking for liberated students. Last year more than 600 people attended each of the sessions in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Washington. In a crowded Manhattan hotel ballroom, Maria Furtado, director of admissions at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., grabs the wireless microphone in front of a crowd of more than 500 parents, students and college counselors and happily shatters conventional wisdom. "Every spring and every fall, this is what you will see and hear in the media: 'No one gets in anywhere,'" she says. "Gloom and doom. Well, we're here to tell you that people get in everywhere!" She polls the crowd: What percentage of kids do you think get into their first-choice school? One guess is 5%; another is 20%. Furtado beams and announces slowly, so as not to let the Good Word slip out too carelessly: "79.8% of first-year students are at their first-choice school."

Other studies say the number is closer to 70%. But whatever the exact figure, if you want to be one of them, Furtado says, "you have to be brave and bold and explore a school you haven't heard of before." That shouldn't be hard for this crowd. As a group, the kids are unorthodox, outspoken late bloomers. "They're very bright, but they didn't discover it until they were juniors or seniors in high school," says Goucher College president Sanford Ungar, who makes the point that those who find their way to a place like Goucher can be more creative than their highly polished peers. "They haven't been flattened by steamrollers in high school," he says. "They haven't been so bruised in the application process that they are incapable of creative thought. Many kids have been so overgroomed by their parents and others."

Elizabeth Pantone, 17, listens closely as admissions officers make their pitch. She's an aspiring writer in an intense Westchester, N.Y., school, who is both pushing against the culture and admitting that she's working harder now in hopes of aiming higher. Her dad, meanwhile, has been trying to meet her halfway, since no matter what she does she's not likely to make it to the schools he originally had in mind. "It's been quite an education for me," he says. "I was thinking name brand in the beginning, but now I really believe in this match idea."

This can be a slow process, educating parents. "After Colleges That Change Lives came out, I got letters from all around the country from mamas saying 'You saved us,'" Pope says. "Well, more mamas need saving." At Brookline High School in Brookline, Mass., headmaster Bob Weintraub estimates that fully 1 in 3 of his students' parents went to Harvard. That means one of his many jobs is defusing the tension they promote. On their own, students set up a wall by the counseling office where they post their rejection letters. They call it the Wall of Shame, but it's a great way for them to realize they're not alone in having their Ivy dreams dashed. "It's a community of the rejected," jokes Weintraub.