Colleges Must Do More to Cultivate Talent, One Campus Leader Says

Colleges must do more to engage their cities and towns and to prepare disadvantaged students within their communities for higher education, Nancy Cantor, chancellor of Rutgers University’s Newark campus, said during a speech to admissions officials here on Wednesday.

“Do we care about cultivating talents?” Ms. Cantor said. “Or are we just going to take what we get, and select, and select, and select?”

Ms. Cantor’s remarks kicked off an annual conference held by the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice. This year’s theme is defining merit, an elusive term entwined with continuing debates about fairness in college admissions.

College officials, Ms. Cantor said, must reimagine how student recruitment works. Instead of merely choosing from among applicants whose talents already are evident, she suggested, colleges should help prospective college students develop their abilities in the first place.

Her message: Educational attainment is also an economic-development question. “We need to be creating farm teams,” Ms. Cantor said. “Each institution we run or are part of should be creating a farm team, cultivating talent just the way Major League Baseball does, and as we do that, we will be doing economic development.”

An outspoken proponent of expanding college access, Ms. Cantor was chancellor of Syracuse University from 2004 through 2013. During that time, she led the university’s efforts to help renew the city of Syracuse, N.Y.

Ms. Cantor also helped diversify the campus. From 2003 to 2012, the share of Syracuse students eligible for federal Pell Grants increased (to 27 percent from 20 percent), and the proportion of nonwhite students nearly doubled (to 31 percent from 16 percent).

Some faculty members and students at Syracuse, however, have worried that the university’s academic reputation has suffered. The university has tumbled in U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of colleges, and its acceptance rate has increased.

Whether colleges choose to value those measures of success and prestige over their public-service missions will have significant repercussions for a rapidly diversifying nation, Ms. Cantor insisted.

“Too often,” she said of colleges, “we are like the ostrich with its head in the sand, ignoring the demographic trends, ignoring the erosion of social mobility, and ignoring the social distress that is created in a country that is supposedly built on opportunity.”