Who Needs Harvard?

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"If I wanted to work right after college, I would have gone to a more 'name school' like Dartmouth," Valenzuela says. But she hopes to become a doctor, so she did some research. "I definitely looked at the medical-acceptance rates of each college and how strong their pre-med programs were, and that helped knock out a lot of colleges." Students with clear professional goals will pay more attention to the reputation of a single department than the whole university. Among the artistically inclined, the Rhode Island School of Design has always been pre-eminent, but schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emerson College and Northeastern University are now attracting kids specifically for their arts curriculums. Gabriel Slavitt, 17, who this spring graduated from Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Calif., says his stepsister "basically flipped out" when she heard he was turning down Brown University in favor of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He admits that he applied to Brown for the name, but he concluded that its arts program was not as strong. "For what I want to study, it doesn't mean anything to me to be around students that are going to help me get a job later in life, business students and the like."

Make Me a Match
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.

At freshman orientation, Weintraub includes a plea for parents to check their college anxieties at the door. "Their kids are just transitioning into high school," he says. "They're going to be exposed to drugs, sex, lots of changes. Can we just deal with the developmental issues first?" By the time they enter the college hunt, many kids have been conditioned to treat the process more as a race than a romance, a test of who comes in first, not what will make them happy. "You ask students what they want," says Rachel Petrella, a counselor at California's La Jolla Country Day School, "and they say, 'What do you mean, What do I want? What do I get? I've been working for four years without daylight. I'm supposed to go to the most selective school I've earned, right?'"