First are the annual reports of high-achieving students being crushed by learning that they were not offered admission to the elite colleges they had chosen — and that represented the essential next step toward the successful lives they had imagined for themselves. (This year’s letters to the editor from distraught students and parents were in The New York Times on April 22.) Failures at the age of 18! And all because they were going to have to settle for a college that was not at the very top of their lists!

Yet all these students had done is what they had been conditioned to do, almost from birth: work very hard earning good grades and accumulating extracurricular activities in order to join the growing competition for the relatively few seats available at elite schools, all in the name of “excellence.” Nothing less than “excellence” would suffice. The fact that the large majority of these high school seniors would be rejected or “wait-listed” — and based on the tiny number of students who are ultimately accepted off the wait list, “wait listed” seems best defined as “being placed in limbo and ignored for several months before being rejected” — thereby leading to senior angst on a massive scale, is just the price one pays in striving for “excellence.” (In other societies, this whole business might qualify as child abuse.)

Second, Amherst College, in the midst of a $650-million capital campaign, announced on its website that it had recently received a single anonymous gift of $100 million.

Third, in news widely covered by the media, Mount Ida College of Newton, Mass., founded in 1899, said that it will be closing its doors at the end of this academic year, forcing its 1,300 undergraduates (plus prospective freshmen) to find other institutions where they might start or complete their post-secondary education.

Consider the relationship of these three stories.

The elite institutions are not increasing the number of seats they have available for new students, yet they are under increasing pressure to admit more students who are high-achieving, but low-income — even as they are seeing growth in the numbers of highly qualified and relatively affluent applicants. The result is a continuing decline in their acceptance rates, thereby breaking the hearts of even more high school seniors. (The acceptance rate of applicants at top liberal arts colleges is generally now around 15 percent; it is in the single digits at elite national universities such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford.)

Amherst College has fewer than 1,900 students. Now that it is $100 million richer, the college says it will construct a building and hire more faculty, but it has announced no plans to add students. Amherst students may have a marginally better educational experience because of this gift, but there won’t be any increase in the size of the Amherst student body. The number of students applying to Amherst will probably increase, but the freshman class will still have fewer than 500 students. Accordingly, the gift will actually reduce, rather than enhance, the likelihood of any given applicant being offered admission to Amherst.

And that’s regrettable, because for the past 15 years Amherst has been ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the second-best liberal arts college in the nation, just behind Williams College. Ah, but in the early years of this century, Amherst was ranked first, ahead of Williams. What would it take for Amherst to reassume its top position?

As it happens, the Williams endowment is about $200 million larger than that of Amherst. (That both colleges boast endowments of well over $2 billion — or more than $1 million of endowment per student — evidently is not yet sufficient.) Would a larger endowment put Amherst back on top? A successful capital campaign for $650 million may answer the question.

But does anyone other than the students and alumni of Amherst or Williams care which of them is number one and which number two? Moreover, the cost of burnishing Amherst’s already lustrous reputation may come at the expense of prospective college students elsewhere. Mount Ida went out of business because it could not attract a sufficient number of students who could afford to pay its tuition, despite deep discounts. That same $100 million would have kept Mount Ida in business by allowing them to increase financial aid for needy students. Instead, we have a closed college, and 1,300 students (many of whom are low-income) being forced to look elsewhere. The $100 million gift may provide a marginal benefit to Amherst, but it is not a gift that provides any benefit to American higher education in general.

I’m not suggesting that Amherst and Mount Ida were in competition for the gift; it’s almost surely the case that the anonymous donor at Amherst has a connection to that college and no connection to Mount Ida. Yet although current federal tax policy places a modest surcharge on endowment earnings for a relative handful of extremely wealthy colleges and universities, it is still the case that the gifts themselves are not taxed, a policy that encourages wealthy individuals to enhance still further the endowments of already exceptionally rich colleges and universities. And there is no end in sight. The growing inequality we see in the wealth and income of individuals and families is mirrored in the world of higher education. The “1 percent” syndrome also exists in higher education, and the chasm in wealth between the elite campuses and all others continues to widen.

This is a situation that does not bode well for our country. The students at these elite universities are disproportionately from families in the top 10 percent of wealth and income. Although Amherst meets the financial needs of its students, almost half of them have no demonstrated financial need and are paying the full list price, which for the current year is almost $70,000 annually (including room and board) — a figure well beyond the reach of the great majority of American families.

Why, with an endowment of over $2 billion, is Amherst’s list price so high? Two reasons: first, its competitors charge about the same amount. A significantly lower price might suggest a “product” of lesser quality. Second, a high list price discourages most people from applying in the first place, suggesting that the colleges think that families at the very top of income and wealth prefer to be with people of similar means. Four years at Amherst costs more than the initiation fee to join Mar-a-Lago; the mere fact that a person is present says a good deal about his or her wealth and power.

Too harsh? Take a look at the Williams College view book that is sent to prospective students, an oversized brochure that gets right to the point. On the second page, in capital letters and a huge font, it reads:

“EXPERIENCE

THE BENEFITS

OF A

$2.5 BILLION

ENDOWMENT”

And in case your eyes slid too quickly over the words, “$2.5 BILLION” is printed in gold.

The following page of the Williams’ brochure is focused on the specifics: high graduation rate, low student-faculty ratio, acceptance at famous graduate schools (all the examples are in the Ivy League) — and high starting salaries, high mid-career salaries and the Williams alumni network to get those well-paying jobs.

The quality of the education? The transformative consequences of four years at Williams? Personal development? Those don’t warrant the big type. But in small type, on the same page, Williams tells us: “With strength comes responsibility. That’s why we use our endowment to level the playing field.”

Which playing field would that be? Polo? The one named for a student’s grandfather? How can an elitist school claim to be leveling the playing field when its students are overwhelmingly from the top tier of family incomes?

Federal tax policy has not only permitted but encouraged the development of a set of colleges and universities that are the educational counterparts of exclusive country clubs, where the price of admission deters average people from even considering applying. By allowing wealthy donors to make tax-exempt gifts to the very schools to which their children and grandchildren will be applying, we have created a wealth-based aristocracy that is both self-perpetuating and largely closed to those who would aspire to climb the socioeconomic ladder. A young person of modest means will not have the advantages of a great K-12 education, summer enrichment programs, special tutors and the many opportunities that are commonplace for the children of privilege, and will instead have to hope to be among the tiny number of applicants selected by elite schools who are not of the social elite.

So what to do? In various ways, professional sports leagues have addressed the problem of having too much success repeatedly concentrated in the same handful of teams. To address the same problem, higher education might consider creating a semblance of parity among a larger number of schools than the miniscule few now occupying the top rung. Specifically, I suggest that we follow the lead of the National Football League, which strives for some level of team-performance parity by capping the size of the salary pool for players. The salary cap ensures that rich big market teams do not have a built-in advantage over teams in small markets that lack equal access to financial resources.

How can that idea be applied to higher education?

A first step might be to eliminate the tax deduction for donors on gifts made to any college or university that already has more than, say, $1 million of endowment per student. An endowment at that level would permit colleges to draw down $50,000 per student per year — a figure that should itself be sufficient to educate the student without a need for additional funding (although presumably the college would still be charging for tuition and fees).

I recognize that the situation is far more complicated at those universities with extensive graduate and professional programs, where dedicated endowment accounts are restricted in how they can be used and where expenses can be much higher. So, for purposes of starting a discussion, my recommendation is limited to undergraduate education and the endowment accounts that are used for that purpose.

But unless and until we begin to swing the pendulum away from inequity and back toward parity, America will continue to be beset by the looming educational problem of the day: a rigged system of higher education where those with wealth and power are hugely advantaged in gaining access to a high-quality college education relative to those who have neither. The corollaries of this problem are a decline in the average quality of a college education; costs rising faster than students and their families can afford; rapidly accumulating debt from college loans and rising default rates on those loans, especially from those who started college, but did not finish; and a widening gap in income and quality of life between the college educated and those who are not, with whites and Asians disproportionately represented in the first group and blacks and Latinos disproportionately represented in the second.

That is not the America I want for my grandchildren. Let’s change it.

On Nov. 16, students at Roger Williams University organized what they referred to as “BlackOut” (pictured below) – a noontime demonstration in support of the students at the University of Missouri whose protests against the indifference of some senior administrators at the university to claims of racism on the campus led to the resignation of the system president and the campus chancellor.

RWU student leaders spoke and presented a proposed list of action steps they wanted to see taken by our campus and then invited me to speak. The prevailing mood at the demonstration was collaborative and civil – no “demands” were made, and no one’s resignation was sought. I was very proud of our students, and I told them that we would form a representative task force to develop a plan, with timelines and metrics, to address their entirely reasonable concerns. Then we returned to our offices and classrooms to resume the work of giving and receiving a university education. The local newspaper wrote a positive editorial about the event (“RWU students’ intelligent requests,” Bristol Phoenix, Nov. 19, 2015).

Given the altogether positive tone of the RWU event, I was more than a little taken aback when I opened my local newspaper two days later, and saw an op-ed with the ominous title, “The Death of America’s Universities” (Providence Journal, Nov. 18, 2015). Odd. I could see from the windows of my home that the Roger Williams campus, even early in the morning, seemed quite active. University employees were driving into the parking lots, as usual, steam was emanating from the roof vents, students were walking on the quad. All seemed entirely normal.

But before leaving for work, I decided to take time to analyze the claim made by the author of the op-ed – a gentleman named T. Robinson Ahlstrom, who identified himself as the “chairman of The George Washington Scholar Endowment” – that American universities had died.

Mr. Ahlstrom’s declaration of the demise of America’s universities was based on the events at the University of Missouri and actions that subsequently followed at other colleges and universities across the nation. Because, early in my career, I had served 11 years as a member of the faculty at the University of Missouri, I had closely followed the story, but it had never occurred to me that someone would equate the resignations of two administrators there with the death of America’s universities.

Mr. Ahlstrom sees the events at the University of Missouri as:

“the convulsive writhing of a patient who has been in rapid decline since the 1960s, when a motley assortment of Marxists, feminists, revenge racists, brats and anarchists embedded themselves deeply in our government, media and institutions of higher learning.”

In case readers missed his point, Mr. Ahlstrom doubles down, comparing the recent history of American higher education to “Hitler’s Germany” and referring to faculty as “ideological storm troopers.” Tenured professors “pitch pipe bombs of contempt onto everything ancient, lovely, sacred and sane.” “[T]he loss of the university will mean the loss of the West.”

Of course what is conveniently swept aside by his rant is the notion of any legitimacy to the concerns that students at the University of Missouri (and now many other universities) raised in the first place: the idea that too many universities remain bastions of privilege for the children of those who have been successful in our society, at the expense of being welcoming to those who have been marginalized by society – that is, people of color; low-income, first-generation college students; those who are not heterosexual; those who are not Judeo-Christian. It is easy to appreciate and understand the dissatisfaction and concern students from marginalized groups feel when they arrive at universities that seem designed to serve only the needs of students from white families who are in the economic mainstream.

We all recognize that the transition from high school to college is, for many students, a daunting challenge. Colleges and universities that truly care about their students have long been concerned about creating support systems for entering freshmen to help ease this transition. But these support systems were designed to serve the students who are from those segments of society that have, for generations, attended college, and too often have not been accommodating to those who are seeking access as the first members of their families to go to college. These students ask: “Where are the faculty who look like me? To whom do I turn for advice and support regarding my issues? Why am I always made to feel as if I don’t belong here? Why am I called upon in class to speak to ‘the black experience’ or ‘what it’s like to be Latino’”?

And perhaps most important of all: “Why are we still having to ask these questions, 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and more than 50 years after the Stonewall riots and the beginning of the LGBTQ movement?” Higher education has always been seen as the doorway to economic opportunity. Why, then, are underrepresented groups still underrepresented? And why would anyone feel that America’s universities face death if students dare to ask these questions?

It is our collective shame that the college graduation rates of students from the lowest economic quintile remain seven times lower than the rates of students from the top quintile – a figure that hasn’t changed in 40 years. Because students of color are disproportionately represented in the lowest economic quintile, whether one measures it by race or by income, there is a very significant “achievement gap” between those on the margins of society and those in the mainstream.

But let’s not confuse the legitimate concerns of students and families that continue to find themselves denied equity of access and support at America’s colleges with political correctness, or with the recent controversy about “trigger warnings” (wherein students demand to be “warned” when a potentially disturbing topic is about to be raised in class).

What students from traditionally underrepresented groups are protesting is not the absence of trigger warnings, or a failure by higher education institutions to be politically correct. Rather, their complaints range from instances of thoughtless insensitivity to blatant racism, sexism and overt discrimination, all of which are too often tolerated or ignored by administrators of our nation’s college campuses. It is the lack of commitment by many colleges and universities to address fairness and equity issues that we should be decrying, not the temerity of students who complain about what they continue to face almost half a century after the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

A final point: trying to develop a campus culture that is free from bias is obviously the right thing to do; elemental fairness would say that students from underrepresented groups should not have to face the additional burden of a hostile educational environment. But it’s easy to miss another very important point: white, middle-class students are not being prepared for the increasingly multicultural world they will enter after graduation if colleges and universities do not work much harder than most have done to date to create a more inclusive campus, one that celebrates, not merely tolerates, diversity.

America’s universities aren’t dead. But if they remain complacent and indifferent to the concerns that students are now raising on campuses across the country, they are in real danger of losing any claim of being society’s moral and ethical leaders.

I can’t guarantee that Roger Williams University will be successful in creating a welcoming and supportive environment for every student – but, working together, the members of our campus family are certainly going to try.