Wellesley Answers Obama’s Call to Expand Higher Ed Opportunities

The White House hosted college presidents, nonprofit organizations, and business leaders Thursday, January 16, for a summit that brought together President Obama’s economic mobility plans and his goal of increasing college completion rates for low-income students in America. More than 100 of America’s top universities and colleges were invited to attend the summit, among them Harvard, Yale, and Wellesley College.
The National Journal published an op-ed by Wellesley President H. Kim Bottomly and Phillip B. Levine, Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics, discussing the summit and the importance of its message. “This focus on low-income students comes at a crucial time,” they wrote. “Socioeconomically, we are not diverse. The main cause of this problem is the lack of information regarding college costs; most low-income families often assume they cannot afford a private four-year college education and many high-achieving, low-income students don’t even bother to apply to selective schools.”