This article profiles Loren Pope, a college consultant and a former education editor at "The New York Times" who touted "no name" colleges and called the nation's most famous university, Harvard University, a rip-off. In his influential book "Colleges That Change Lives" (Penguin, 1996), Mr. Pope profiled 40 institutions--most of them small liberal-arts colleges--which, he wrote, would "do at least as much, and usually far more than, an Ivy League school, an Ivy clone, or a major research university to give you a rich, full life, and to make you a winner." The late admissions consultant valued the fit between an individual student and a college more than he did an Ivy League pedigree. In speeches and writings, he offered students and parents an antidote to the chase for top-25 prestige. He encouraged students to evaluate colleges based on their own personal needs and strengths, and not on institutional rankings or reputations.