About Loren Pope

September 24, 2008

Colleges That Change Lives, Inc. mourns the passing of our mentor, colleague and dear friend, Loren Pope. We remember and celebrate his life and all that he stood for as he became known as the "Ralph Nader of college admissions." Long before others criticized the rankings industry, Loren Pope was gathering data to make the case for the success of the lesser known colleges where students were competing and excelling along side their Ivy and Name Brand counterparts.

His signature books, Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You and three editions of Colleges That Change Lives helped change the way students, parents and counselors viewed the college search process. He served as a role model for college admission officers--counselor first, recruiter second. Likewise, he challenged institutions to conduct holistic application reviews, where the focus was on the "whole" student, not just a few numbers.

He made a difference in the lives of thousands of students as he counseled them to choose a college for fit, not rank and to "look beyond the ivy league" to find faculty who were not just teachers but mentors for life. Many of the parents he worked with exclaimed that he not only helped their children find a college, he helped save their marriages in the process! His thoughtful, humorous and sometimes unorthodox approach to college counseling, earned him the respect and admiration of generations of college bound students and their parents as well as his colleagues in the college admission profession.

We will miss this great man and we are proud to carry on his message through the work of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, founded as a result of his example of what collaboration not competition, in education and in life can accomplish.

Loren Pope was a Washington newspaperman who became concerned with the lack of consumer information on colleges and the resulting disastrous choices, which ultimately have led to extremely high dropout, transfer, and failure rates on U.S. college and university campuses.

Pope started an education column for the Gannett Newspapers in 1952, which led to the education editorship of The New York Times. He opened College Placement Bureau in 1965 to provide counseling and the consumer information that would help students make fruitful choices.

Pope’s first book, The Right College: How to Get In, Stay In, Get Back In (Macmillan, 1970) and several magazine articles followed, including the nationally syndicated “Twenty Myths That Can Jinx Your College Choice,” first published in The Washington Post Magazine and later as “Facts to Know in Picking a College” by Readers’ Digest.

A second book, Looking Beyond the Ivy League, Finding the College That’s Right for You, (Penguin, 1995) was praised by Dr. David Breneman, retired dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, as “the best discussion of the liberal arts with which I am familiar.” It is a companion to Colleges That Change Lives (Penguin 1996, 2000, 2006), which profiles 40 colleges “that will do as much, and usually far more, than any status school to give you the rich, full life.” The updated 2006 edition features a “Ten Years Later” section after each profile to testify to each school’s continuing power to transform.