"THERE’S a whole lot wrong with the conversation about including more low-income students at elite colleges, but let’s start here: The effort is too often framed as some do-gooder favor to those kids.
Hardly. It’s a favor to us all. It’s a plus for richer students, who are then exposed to a breadth of perspectives that lies at the heart of the truest, best education. With the right coaxing and mixing on campus, they become more fluent in diversity, which has professional benefits as well as the obvious civic and moral ones.
It’s a win for America and its imperiled promise of social mobility.
“Opportunity for people from every conceivable background is essential to a functioning democracy, and in this country we’re not providing enough of it,” Biddy Martin, the president of Amherst College, told me last week. “I also think it’s a waste not to develop talent in young people wherever it exists, and it exists everywhere.”
So what’s Amherst doing?
Over recent years, it has devoted significantly more energy and resources than it once did into identifying and recruiting promising students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It works with community-based organizations. It develops relationships with, and sends emissaries to, schools in poorer areas."
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