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College Presidents and Public Education

By James E. Ryan

Several weeks ago, three of the country’s most respected institutions of higher learning, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Virginia, announced that they were embarking on a nationwide campaign to recruit more poor students. Around the same time, The Chronicle of Higher Education released a report documenting the rising salaries of college presidents. In it, higher education experts explained that the increases reflected the fact that college presidents have become like corporate leaders.

At first blush, these two stories might not seem related, but they very much are. Both point to the fact that college presidents have become intensely focused on what happens at their own institutions, often to the exclusion of broader issues affecting education, and sometimes at the expense of elementary and high schools.

Consider the efforts to recruit poor students. Harvard, Princeton, and U.Va. are reacting to a troubling pattern: The percentage of low-income students at elite colleges and universities is quite low. Precise figures are hard to come by, but a 2004 report indicated that at the most selective colleges, only 3 percent of the students were from the poorest sector of society, and only 10 percent from the bottom half. Perhaps even more troubling, the percentage of low-income students on some campuses has declined over the last decade. Ten years ago at the University of Virginia, for example, more than 10 percent of the students came from low-income households; today, less than 7 percent do. Many college campuses are becoming the province of the economic elite, where the very essence of the American Dream—that a child from a modest home can, by dint of hard work, climb as far as talent will take him or her—seems to...