The Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards declined to be interviewed about his positions on higher education for a profile in this week’s Chronicle. But in 2006, Mr. Edwards, who then was the director of the Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sat down with the reporter Jeffrey Selingo as part of The Chronicle’s series on the growing divide in higher education, which looked at the haves and have-nots among students and institutions.

Mr. Edwards talked about the difficulty poor students have getting to college and why he thinks the country should adopt a program he started in Greene County, N.C., to help high-school students there pay for college. Here are excerpts from the conversation:

How important do you think a college education is for the poorest students in America to succeed?

It’s everything. In this age of globalization, the only things that are mobile are education and capital. Poor kids don’t have capital, so the one tool they have available to them is their hard work, their energy, and their mind. Education is absolutely critical in them being able to be successful. And that’s going to become more intensely true going forward than it is today, which is why … the trend away from getting poor kids, poorer kids, into college is such a disturbing thing, especially when you marry that to the fact that billions of dollars [for financial aid] are being cut out of the federal budget

It’s a very foolish, shortsighted policy for America. It’s also not a healthy thing for our democracy, because we already live in a country where most of the economic growth of America has occurred over the last two decades among the wealthiest people in the country, while middle-income families’ and low-income families’ wages have been basically either stagnant or going down.

All these things are connected, of course, because that means there’s less money available to send kids to college … and as a result — surprise, surprise — fewer and fewer poor kids end up in college. All we’re doing is making it more and more difficult for kids out of poor families to be able to do what I’ve been able to do and to have a chance to do better themselves. There’s a lot of talent and ability in the group of young people we’re talking about, and we’re losing it.

Do you think it’s all about the price of a higher education for needy students, or is it about convincing them that college is necessary?

It’s both. We’ve started this model program in Greene County, N.C., and I know from our experience there that … it’s not just the kids knowing they’re going to be able to go. There have to be people interacting with them, which we’ve had at the school, making sure they understand how important this is. When their parents didn’t go to college, when they don’t live in an environment where most people go to college and it’s not a given, then inertia pushes them in a different direction or keeps them from going in the right direction.

Some of it also is not just money; it’s the bureaucratic hurdles that they’re confronted with, which are worrisome and frightening for a 16-, 17-year-old kid whose parents didn’t go to college, and they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. The easiest thing for them to do is go to work at the chicken plant instead of going to college. All these things unfortunately combine to make it a lot harder.

So even among these families in Greene County where neither parent went to college, do you think there is an expectation among their children that they will go?

I’m not sure how much it existed beforehand, although when we went down there originally, the response was incredibly enthusiastic. Now it is just sort of in their minds that they can go to college. Now they have a real choice, as opposed to seeing all these hurdles that they were confronted with.

We went down to give out scholarships … and afterwards people were saying, you have no idea how much this means to me. They now have a real chance. That’s the way they think about it. There was one family where there were twins, and they were both thinking about going to East Carolina [University]. But the twins were saying to me, “You know there’s just no way our parents could pay for this. It couldn’t be done, and we couldn’t figure out how to get the financial aid that we needed.”

One of the elements that we’ve incorporated into this is we actually require the kids to work either on campus or off campus, 10 hours a week. Then we only pay for the first year.

Why just the first year?

It’s almost entirely a money thing because of the cost. I have to raise the money, and the cost became prohibitive to raise the money for four years. I’d love to see it be a four-year thing, and I think if we were going to do this in the nation, we could find the money to do it as a four-year program. And it makes all the sense in the world because all kids get a chance to go to college. There are no bureaucratic hurdles. They have to work to earn what they’re getting. They don’t come out of college with a huge burden of debt, so it accomplishes a lot of things, but it costs some money.

So you would basically guarantee a public higher education just like we do a K-12 education?

You still have to be qualified to go, and you have to be willing to work. ... I think the country would be for that, actually. It’s just nobody’s made the case for it. As you know, there are states around the country who have similar programs, the HOPE Scholarship and Grant Program in Georgia. In Indiana my friend Evan Bayh did something similar to this. So I think that there are places where it’s been done; it’s just not been done nationally.

At a time when higher education is seen increasingly as a private good, though, how can you make a case for more public investment in higher education?

It’s just as important as K-12. We decided as a nation that we’re going to make public education K-12 available to all kids and try to make it as high quality as we could. Well, in today’s world, that’s just not enough. Higher education is absolutely crucial to being successful and not just important for the individual kids involved and their families.

It’s important for America, because if we are not competing, particularly in areas like math and science and technology, places where the Chinese in particular, but India and others that are putting an enormous amount of effort and money, it makes it very hard for America to be competitive economically over the long term. Colleges are the places where we ensure that America is competitive.

And right now everything is moving in the wrong direction. It’s harder and harder for kids to go to college, and as a result, you diminish the number of kids who create the pool for graduate education. We’ve moved in the wrong way in terms of investing in graduate programs. We’ve taken away or stagnated funding for the NIH and our research universities. It’s just a mistake. It’s very shortsighted.

But wouldn’t a national College for Everyone plan be very expensive and politically difficult to enact?

I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody’s asked the country to do things like this. I think that it would be completely acceptable, certainly in the form it’s in, which is for the first year of college. So you get kids into schools, and then they could take advantage of the financial-aid programs there. I think you could actually sell it. ... It’s just a basic fundamental judgment about where higher education fits on the spectrum of priorities. I mean, if we as a nation commit that this is at the top of the list, then lack of money won’t be an issue. But if on the other hand we think our priority is to give tax cuts to rich people, then the money won’t be available for what’s happening at this university.

Have the discussions in higher education over the use of race in admissions pushed conversations about poor students to the back burner?

The way I think about it is the two are connected. If you look at the income gap, the asset gap, the education gap that exist in America, there’s clearly a huge racial component to all those things. I don’t think they act independently of one another. I am a strong believer in affirmative action. I think it’s important. But I also believe that we need not just racial diversity, but we need economic diversity in our colleges and universities.

Should there be admissions based on social class?

I’ve never been a quota guy. I don’t believe in quotas. But I do think that universities have to recognize their public responsibilities … and then aggressively go out to meet that responsibility. And that means we want diversity across the board. We want ethnic diversity. We want economic diversity. We want—to the extent we’re funded by North Carolina taxpayers, there’s a limit on this—but we’d certainly like geographic diversity within North Carolina and geographic diversity to the extent possible outside of North Carolina.