The ever sagacious W. Robert Connor, a strong advocate for the humanities who has served as director of the National Humanities Center and president of the Teagle Foundation, always has interesting things to say about higher education. I should be reading his blog more frequently, but fortunately for me, I'm on his electronic mailing list, which he uses to inform friends of recent blog posts.
From his most recent mailing, I've learned about a post from last month on the exploding divide in endowment levels between rich and poor colleges. Connor notes how Princeton's endowment is now more than $2.5 million dollars per student, and endowments at these levels enable already wealthy schools to have all sorts of extra goodies, while many other colleges are struggling just to keep the doors open.
Connor suggests the wealthiest colleges "contribute to a fund to address structural problems that currently keep talented young people from getting a first-rate education — the quality of high school instruction, the skewed admission process, curricular weaknesses in many colleges, etc." Connor suggests such a fund could easily raise $1 billion a year with minimal impact on wealthy schools.
I doubt this will ever happen, but Connor's concerns about the declining reach of a liberal-arts education among the American public are valid. And this does not bode well for the nation's longterm economic and civic well-being.