(4 of 4)
Even headier are the big dreams at Vermont's tiny Marlboro College, founded in 1946 on three old farms in the Green Mountains. "We don't fit any stereotype," says President Thomas Ragle, 32, who came to teach and became president instead. Ragle is looking for "the creative intellectual, who may or may not score high on college boards." Not even accredited yet. Marlboro makes every student take a two-day, 16-hour comprehensive exam covering all fields. Flunkers may try again, but must pass to graduate. Also required: a rigorous research project so independently pursued that a student might even go off to Europe for a year to finish it. In such matters Ragle is an experimenter off on his own, but he speaks for all 50 colleges when he says: "We feel the only excuse we have for existing is quality, and we're shooting for the sky."