New Aspen Institute Head Turned Theories Into Accomplishments

(Bloomberg View) -- With ideas under siege, the world needs intellectual leaders with the creativity and vision to translate ideas into practice and restore people's faith in knowledge along the way. Dan Porterfield has done that as president of Franklin & Marshall, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.

Last week, he was appointed president of the Aspen Institute, a think tank that fosters leadership and nonpartisan dialogue. That'll give wider exposure to his flair for turning ideas into action.

I've known Porterfield for half a decade, through my grandfather's involvement in Franklin & Marshall. I've been most impressed with the way he transformed the college's student body.

Porterfield has raised the representation of low-income students, increasing the proportion of Pell Grant recipients at F&M from an average of 7 percent of incoming students to about 19 percent. And he's done it without declines in academic standards or graduation rates. These new students, mostly from families in the bottom fifth of the U.S. income scale, have done just as well as their classmates (and dramatically outperformed Pell Grant recipients' national average).

This success is a case-study in activating good ideas. A landmark study showed that most high-achieving, low-income students don't apply to selective colleges, probably because they tend to be isolated from other high achievers and thus don't learn about opportunities that are available to them. Under Porterfield's leadership, F&M figured out how to identify those students and build pipelines to recruit and embrace them -- boosting F&M's socioeconomic diversity and improving the entire college.

This work has earned Porterfield and his collaborators numerous accolades, including White House recognition as “Champions of Change for College Opportunity.” Moreover, their strategy has become a nationwide model for increasing access to education and the opportunities it provides.

The U.S. needs pathways to opportunity more than ever – paths that will have to be built on ideas. The Aspen Institute has been nurturing those sorts of ideas for years. Now Porterfield has the chance to put them into action.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

1. This finding is especially striking because the study also showed that when high-achieving, low-income students do attend selective colleges, they graduate at high rates, and often end up paying less than their peers who attend less selective colleges.

To contact the author of this story: Scott Duke Kominers at kominers@fas.harvard.edu.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net.

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