Reading “College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students” in this past Wednesday’s New York Times, I was struck by the thinking and reassessment going on at Reed College in response to declining revenue and high costs. I couldn’t help but think that Reed President Colin Driver’s remarks are the same kind of refocusing that we’re thinking about in the boarding school world.

Boarding schools will always have larger non-academic components than colleges; boarding schools must provide a home life for their pre-college students. But what and how much is now open for discussion. What and how much do we need to educate our students well?  What does it mean to educate our students well?

Four paragraphs from “College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students:”

‘”Like everybody, we are trying to start by trying to cut the stuff that is least likely to inflict real pain on the program,’ said Colin Diver, Reed’s president. When he talks about Reed’s short-term response to the recession, Mr. Diver concedes he is torn, wondering whether a broader reassessment would be in order.

Perhaps it would be a good thing, he said, if the recession could refocus college administrators on the quality of higher education, rather than on investments in climbing walls (Reed does not have one) and other “country club” aspects of college life that have fueled an academic arms race reliant on tuition increases and fund-raising.

‘The catering to consumer tastes — I keep trying to say, we are in the education business,’ Mr. Diver said, describing the pressure to keep up with wealthier colleges and expressing a frustration rarely voiced publicly by college presidents. ‘The whole principle behind higher education is, we know something that you don’t. Therefore, we shouldn’t cater to them.’

But no college president wants to be first to make major changes in the college experience; Reed, for example, is not abandoning plans for a new performing arts center. “If we’re going to change our ways, we’re really going to need to be pushed,” Mr. Diver said, referring to colleges generally. “It’s not going to well up from within.”

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