Loren Pope, a longtime education writer who advised generations of high-school students to consider small liberal-arts colleges instead of better-known universities, has died at age 98, The Washington Post reported.

Mr. Pope, who opened his own admissions-counseling business in 1965, was the author of several influential college guides, including Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even if You’re Not a Straight-A Student, published in 1996 and since updated. He told The New York Times last year that he had “egalitarian instincts, and that’s why I’m opposed to the elite schools’ status and prestige.”

Mr. Pope was also well known for having commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a small house in 1939, when Mr. Pope earned $50 a week as a copy editor at the old Washington Evening Star. The delightful 1,200-square-foot structure was one of the so-called “Usonian” houses by which Wright hoped to provide good architecture for people of modest means. The project, which ended up going hundred of dollars over budget, cost a total of $7,000.

Mr. Pope and his growing family lived in the house until 1946, when it became too crowded, and Mr. Pope reluctantly sold it to Robert and Marjorie Leighey. In 1964 Mrs. Leighey donated the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which maintains it as a museum. —Lawrence Biemiller