I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a university leader say, in one form or another, “We exist to serve our state.” You can’t sling a cat without hitting a university mission statement that doesn’t say some version of that line. It’s noble, aspirational and true, but at this moment, when public confidence in higher education is wavering, demographics are shifting and opportunity gaps are widening, words alone are not enough.
Serving the state can sound like a one-way transaction where the university provides, the public receives, but our communities need something deeper. Public universities must not only serve their states but embody them. This isn’t a call to turn back the clock or resist the changing face of our states. Our institutions should mirror the full diversity of the people they serve. The deeper concern is that we’ve loosened our grip on the very idea of publicness itself, the belief that higher education exists for everyone.
The Long Shadow of Gated Communities
Almost twenty years ago, Tom Mortenson wrote an essay with a title that still lands hard: “Gated Communities of Higher Education.” His argument was as elegant as it was unsettling. Many of the nation’s public flagships, once proud symbols of democratic access, were, in his words, “building walls.” Those walls weren’t made of stone. They were built from rising tuition, growing selectivity and a slow drift toward out-of-state enrollment that could patch budget holes but chipped away at the public mission. Mortenson warned that these trends were creating a system that looked less and less like the states that built it.
He wasn’t wrong. The research since has been clear. Studies show that as state appropriations declined, many public universities leaned heavily on nonresident students, shifting the socioeconomic and racial makeup of their campuses (Jaquette, Curs, & Posselt, 2016; Curs & Jaquette, 2017). And research from Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, and Yagan (2020) has made the point even more plainly—specifically, that the primary barrier for low-income students isn’t talent but access. When admitted to selective colleges, they do as well as anyone. The tragedy is how few ever get the chance.
None of this happened because universities stopped caring about equity. It happened because leaders were backed into corners, caught between declining state support, political polarization and the blunt math of tuition dependence. I know the quiet, uneasy moment when a university that was built to serve everyone must decide who it can actually afford to serve, but necessity doesn’t erase consequence. When nonresident tuition becomes a lifeline, institutions slowly drift from the people who built them. When selectivity is mistaken for excellence, opportunity narrows. And when belonging isn’t part of the institutional design, representation becomes something we track rather than something we live.
Embodying, Not Just Serving
To embody a state means to carry its character in our institutional DNA, to reflect its complexity, its diversity, its contradictions and its aspirations. It means building real pathways for real people: stackable credentials, credit for prior learning and flexible options for working adults, parents, veterans and rural learners.
It also means seeing the millions of Americans who have some college but no credential, people who once trusted us with their dreams but left without a degree. They are the living reminder of our unfinished public mission. Helping them return and finish what they started is not a side project. It’s central to who we claim to be. When we make it easier for these learners to come back, with flexible scheduling, affordable pathways and recognition of the learning they’ve already earned, we show that higher education still belongs to the people, not just to the privileged few.
And it means connecting learning to impact. In every state, graduates of public universities don’t just fill jobs, they anchor communities. They staff our schools and hospitals, launch nonprofits and start-ups, serve in public office and care for our neighbors. When universities align programs with real community needs, like education, health care, conservation, technology, they don’t just prepare graduates. They strengthen the civic and economic fabric of the places they call home.
I have enormous empathy for the people leading our public universities today. They are navigating demographic decline, political fracture and financial models that no longer add up. Many are doing what I consider heroic work in impossible conditions. However, if we want to restore public trust, we can’t keep adding gates and calling it survival. We must build bridges.
That begins with honesty. Many of our most visible institutions no longer resemble the states they were built to serve as it concerns race, income or geography. That doesn’t make them villains. It makes them human. But it also calls for courage to do better. We can set goals that measure progress against the demographics of our states, not just our peers. We can reward the institutions that expand access and persistence. We can broaden high-impact learning opportunities, so opportunity isn’t limited to those who can afford to work for free. And we can partner with K–12 schools, community colleges and workforce systems to close equity gaps long before students ever apply.
That’s what it means to act like the public institutions we were chartered to be.
Rebuilding the public compact is not higher education’s burden alone. States and the federal government must also reinvest in the public systems they helped create. Disinvestment isn’t neutral. It’s cumulative. Each cut makes opportunity a little more conditional and the public mission a little more rhetorical. Philanthropy has a role too. Foundations often chase innovation at the margins but overlook the everyday work of affordability, belonging, and student support. If we are serious about embodying our states, our partnerships must be durable, not episodic, and rooted in shared responsibility rather than short-term projects.
A New Compact with the Public
The old promise of public higher education was simple: Public universities belong to the people. Over time, policy choices, market logic and disinvestment have worn that promise thin. Rebuilding it will require a new compact between institutions and their states, one that measures success by how broadly we open our doors. That compact calls for courage to balance mission with markets, humility to listen to communities, creativity to design for today’s and tomorrow’s learners, and transparency about who we actually serve. It also calls for collective will, from government, philanthropy and higher education alike, to rebuild what decades of neglect have hollowed out. To embody our states is not to reject excellence. It is to insist that excellence be shared.
References
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Saez, E., Turner, N., & Yagan, D. (2020). Income segregation and intergenerational mobility across colleges in the United States. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(3), 1567–1633.
Curs, B. R., & Jaquette, O. (2017). Crowded out? The effect of nonresident enrollment on resident access to public research universities. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 39(4), 644–670.
Jaquette, O., Curs, B. R., & Posselt, J. R. (2016). Tuition rich, mission poor: Nonresident enrollment growth and the socioeconomic and racial composition of public research universities. Journal of Higher Education, 87(5), 635–673.
Mortenson, T. G. (2005). The gated communities of higher education. Postsecondary Education Opportunity, (162). Oskaloosa, IA: The Mortenson Research Seminar on Public Policy Analysis of Opportunity for Postsecondary Education.
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