Elite Colleges Lag in Serving the Needy

By KARIN FISCHER

The institutions with the most money do a poor job of reaching the students with the least

In 1940, James Bryant Conant, then president of Harvard University, laid out his vision of an egalitarian society, a classless culture based on educational opportunity, not chance of birth.

The nation had the duty "to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life," Mr. Conant said in the speech at the University of California.

But more than six decades after