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. 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 be fading from view. The effort by these three institutions to recruit more poor students is laudable, but it"s also like treating the symptom rather than the disease. The real problem is not that there are bus loads of qualified poor students every year who just decide to give Harvard a pass. It"s that there are far too few poor students who are even remotely prepared to attend Harvard. Stepping up the recruitment of poor students might create a more diverse campus and therefore benefit colleges and universities, as well as the lucky few poor students who attend them. But why don"t college presidents also talk publicly about the fact that so few poor students seem prepared to attend college, let alone an elite university Better still, why not talk about what to do about that fact The failure of college and university presidents to speak out on this issue is symptomatic of a broader problem: These leaders are pretty much invisible in the public sphere and, most jarringly, in the debates and discussions about K12 education. To be sure, college presidents are busy people, with complicated institutions to guide and plenty of problems of their own. But they are also leaders in the larger enterprise of education, and they are in an unparalleled position to make a valuable contribution to the discussion of what should happen to students before they graduate from high school. Perhaps instead of just focusing on the bottom line, they should be thinking more about the broader picture.It seems that the American Dream______.