THERE’S a whole lot wrong with the conversation about including more low-income students at elite colleges, but let’s start here: The effort is too often framed as some do-gooder favor to those kids.

Hardly. It’s a favor to us all. It’s a plus for richer students, who are then exposed to a breadth of perspectives that lies at the heart of the truest, best education. With the right coaxing and mixing on campus, they become more fluent in diversity, which has professional benefits as well as the obvious civic and moral ones. It’s a win for America and its imperiled promise of social mobility.