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: The College Admissions Mystique by Bill Mayher and Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You by Loren Pope. If you think Ivy (for undergraduate) is the answer before reading these three books, you may discover a change of opinion after reading these books.