For the last couple years, I have been working hard with one goal in sight: college. I have always wanted to go to some prestigious, well-known, fancy college, like Harvard, Yale, Northwestern or UChicago. But what if there was another option?

I recently read Loren Pope's "Colleges That Change Lives" out of pure boredom. I expected it to be another silly, "you don't have to go to Harvard to succeed," type of books that don't offer any practical alternative to not going to Harvard. In a way, CTCL is one of those books, except that it does offer an alternative to Harvard: it offers more than 40 alternatives.

The overall point Mr. Pope makes is that the only reason that Harvard and its peers have such great results is that the students coming in are already high achieving. They would succeed no matter where they go. Wouldn't a school that can take in low-achieving students and produce Rhodes Scholars, CEOs and Ph.D.s. Pope makes a very compelling argument and offers 44 colleges that he claims truly change lives. These colleges take a majority of their applicants, and most don't care about grades or SAT scores, they just want to see drive. Just because they don't care about typical measures of student success doesn't mean they aren't challenging, these schools tend to be more challenging than typical colleges, because they focus on improving student's learning skills and thought process and truly changing students. These schools tend to be smaller, so teachers can focus in on students and truly make a difference.

These small, quirky, very different colleges may not be for everyone; I don't even know if they are for me. But the point stands, there are way more options for college out there than the rankings let on. College is supposed to be a life-changing four years; we owe it to ourselves to check out every possible avenue, big and small.

For more information about Colleges That Change Lives, check out the website.