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Loren Pope

Loren Pope, a Washington newspaperman who had led the fight for better schools in rural Loudoun County, Virginia, first started writing a column about education for the Gannett Newspapers in 1952, which led to the education editorship of The New York Times during the height of the college-going chaos of the late 1950s. Then, and later as a top administrator of what is now Oakland University in Michigan, he became deeply concerned with the lack of consumer information on colleges, and the heavy dropout, transfer, and failure rates resulting from uninformed choices. This concern was triggered by poor advice he got for his own son from friends in the then Office of Education.

In 1965, he opened the College Placement Bureau in Washington to help families make informed, fruitful choices and became one of America's most respected experts on the college application process. Out of his research and experience came the books Colleges That Change Lives and Looking Beyond the Ivy League.

Mr. Pope passed away in 2008, but his legacy lives on through Colleges That Change Lives, a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and support of the student-centered college search process.