Among the big leftist education ideas is that we don’t have enough diversity. Not just the skin color and ancestry diversity, but also economic diversity. They’d have us believe that the country would make great strides if only elite colleges would admit more students from low-income families. A perfect illustration is found in this Ed Central piece by Stephen Burd.

Burd is writing about a program at Washington University in St. Louis that aims to double the enrollment of students who get Pell grants. The official behind this is former UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Holden Thorp, who states, “Improving the socioeconomic diversity of our student body is not just important; it’s critical to our success as a university.” Gosh, how did Wash U. ever become known as a good school? Will it plunge out of sight unless they admit more kids who are eligible for Pell grants? Or is that just the sort of silly stuff that academic administrators feel compelled to say to remain members in good standing of the liberal intelligentsia?

But for Burd, Wash U isn’t going far enough. “Getting to 13 percent in five years is not a very impressive goal, considering that other elite private colleges like Amherst and Vassar, have made more impressive gains over a comparable period of time.”

People like Thorp and Burd evidently think that it is some big advance in social justice when more students who’d otherwise have gone to a less prestigious institution are preferentially admitted to schools like Wash U, Amherst, Vassar and so on. It isn’t. Prestigious colleges and universities are not necessarily better learning environments for the preferred students; often, they’re worse. And assuming that the students graduate with a useful degree (which, as Peter Arcidiacono showed was often not the case at Duke), having earned it from a prestige institution doesn’t make much difference in the long run. How well they’ll do depends on their work, not on their academic credentials.

This is just another leftist feel good exercise.