View this post on the web at [link removed]

More than a hundred years ago, a skinny college president with a thick mustache rode on horseback through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He came to a farm where he hopped off the horse, approached a young farmhand and invited him to go to college. The boy protested—he’d hardly gone to school before, and his family had no money. The college president stood his ground and offered to let the boy pay tuition by tending a campus garden.
The president was Josephus Hopwood, founder of three colleges in the South. Hopwood lore is full of stories like this one, the historian Michael Santos tells me. Researching his book about one of Hopwood’s schools [ [link removed] ], Santos found numerous records of parents sending only a dollar for tuition, or offering a cow as payment.
I love these Hopwood stories because they show a sharp contrast with the schools that society spends the most time gushing over or fretting about today. Today’s most selective schools—the ones that turn away most of their applicants and would never ride horseback to recruit a student off a farm—enjoy impressive rankings, higher tuition, more philanthropic support and prestigious career connections for new graduates. They also prompt the most hand-wringing about their student demographics, as though the only way to improve equity in America is to get Harvard and its peers to start online programs and satellite campuses [ [link removed] ], admit some students by lottery [ [link removed] ] and adopt income-based affirmative action [ [link removed] ].
It’s like someone decided education was a scarce delicacy served at the table of a few elite schools authorized to cultivate wisdom, with crumbs sprinkled on the floor for the rest of us.
Josephus Hopwood, on the other hand, wanted to make education abundant—more like a banquet to which forgotten students were invited. If we want to use education to improve more people’s lives, we should revive some of Hopwood’s ideals and invest more in the schools that make abundant education real.
Education for Everyone
Hopwood was an idealist to the bone, even when it cost him. As a Union soldier in the Civil War, he was captured and spent a winter in a Confederate prison camp because he had given his horse to a sick comrade. In his autobiography [ [link removed] ], he describes turning down a faculty job in Illinois because he wanted to found schools in “the neediest field in the South.” He started colleges in Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia.
Most colleges of Hopwood’s era served only a select few: economic elites in the North, and wealthy “proprietors of the plantation economy” in the South [ [link removed] ]. Furthermore, most schools were single-sex. But Hopwood believed education was for everyone. As one of his students wrote in the introduction to Hopwood’s autobiography, his teacher reached for “the ideal of the education of all of the people, both men and women, white and black, rich and poor.” That’s why Hopwood rode horseback for long distances to recruit boys and girls who had been overlooked by other schools: His colleges were for them.
Hopwood was driven by the purpose he saw in education. “The true objective of education,” he believed, “is to make its possessor happier and more useful to society at large” and to “develop thought, memory and imagination, to give power of expression, cultivate the judgment and lead the student upward in his thinking.” Education wasn’t about U.S. News rankings or glossy brochures. Rather, Hopwood’s goal for students seeking an education was a life well lived.
Colleges That Change More Lives
From 2015 to 2020, I worked at Hopwood’s Virginia school that he originally founded in a bankrupt hotel, now called the University of Lynchburg. True to Hopwood’s vision, it admits 96% of applicants, according to its U.S. News profile [ [link removed] ]. On my first day working there, a co-worker told me, “This is a college that takes ordinary people and makes them extraordinary human beings.”
The University of Lynchburg isn’t alone in this mission. Another example of a school embracing Hopwood-like ideals is Utah Valley University, which accepts 100% of applicants and achieves phenomenal results. President Astrid Tuminez recently told the Deseret News [ [link removed] ], “UVU is ranked No. 1 in Utah ... for alumni earnings. Business Insider ranked us as one of the top three universities in the nation for the best return on investment. Every year, we graduate 5,000 students to four- and five-star jobs. ... We place graduate students at MIT, Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge.” Yes, schools that would reject most UVU undergrads sometimes take them as graduate students.
Historically Black colleges and universities also play a critical role in abundant education. Not only do they have more success in graduating Black engineers, scientists and doctors, but they also outperform other universities on economic mobility [ [link removed] ].
Then there are the thousands of community colleges nationwide, which offer a significant cost advantage over four-year universities. Their tuition and fees average less than $4,000 per year [ [link removed] ], easily covered by the average Pell Grant of nearly $4,600 [ [link removed] ].
True, a community college education is not as robust as one from the Ivy League, but it still serves many students well. The ranks of former community college students [ [link removed] ] include people such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, astronaut Eileen Collins, actor Morgan Freeman and author Amy Tan.
Time To Invest in Abundance
These are only a few of the schools that make education abundant. When society largely overlooks them and showers prestige, attention and resources on the most selective schools, we create an illusion of scarcity.
Fortunately, this illusion can be erased. Recent events—including the Supreme Court case ruling against race-based affirmative action [ [link removed] ], surging antisemitism [ [link removed] ] and the ousting of presidents at Stanford [ [link removed] ] and Harvard [ [link removed] ] over academic misconduct—have started conversations about the value of elite schools. These conversations make right now an ideal time to begin treating education more abundantly, and there are three places we can start.
First, let’s reevaluate the prestige of elite schools as students are deciding where to attend. My oldest child is 11, but YouTube already serves me ads offering Ivy League admissions help. Rather than pushing kids to aim for the top schools, we should encourage students to look for the college that best meets own unique needs, interests and desired career paths.
Second, philanthropists who covet the prestige that comes with donating to an elite school can instead look for schools that make education abundant. A gift that could be a rounding error in an Ivy League budget could go a long way at schools that serve less well-heeled students. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested such a strategy [ [link removed] ]. “You’re just much better off finding a smaller or poorer school where your money will be welcomed, your opportunities to effect real transformation will be ample and your millions can build something dynamic or beautiful,” he wrote.
Third, employers can partner with less-selective universities. As David Brooks observed [ [link removed] ], “We now have whole industries that take attendance at an elite school as a marker of whether they should hire you or not.” This does not need to be the case. If companies create career pipelines in less elite schools, they would support a broader spectrum of students and tap into currently hidden pools of talent, including students who lacked the advantages necessary to get into elite schools.
None of this is to say that equity and improved access do not matter in selective schools. They should eliminate any discrimination against racial minorities, and they should cast a wider net. These colleges’ efforts to reach out to rural students [ [link removed] ] and cover tuition for low-income students [ [link removed] ] are an encouraging sign.
But if our goal is to educate more people and create more upward mobility, there’s a more efficient path than tweaking the demographics of Harvard’s incoming class. It begins when we champion the vision of abundant education with little need for rationing—a vision exemplified by Josephus Hopwood and other educational pioneers. We do that by investing attention and resources in those schools that excel at educating the students Harvard denies.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?