“For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse,” David Leonhardt of The Times writes in his Economic Scene column today, “their student bodies remained shockingly affluent.” In calling on universities to mount, in effect, a concerted affirmative action program for low-income students, Mr. Leonhardt writes: “At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.” As a template for the future, he points to Amherst College in Massachusetts, which, he said, has bolstered its enrollment of lower-income students by devoting more resources to financial aid and using its transfer program mostly to admit community college students.
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