The Diversity We Forgot to Value

After a recent talk at Yale, I met a student who reminded me of a kind of diversity higher education routinely overlooks. To protect his privacy, I’ll keep the details thin. He was not a traditional 18-year-old undergraduate. Before arriving at Yale, he had served our country in the Marine Corps. I left grateful for his service and thinking about what his presence means for the university. He was enrolled through  Yale’s Eli Whitney Students Program , created for those whose paths to college are unconventional. Some have served in the military. Others worked full-time, raised families, pursued careers, or discovered their academic calling late. The program reflects a simple but profound idea: intellectual ability is not confined to a single timeline. That idea deserves serious attention. For years, colleges have devoted enormous energy to discussing diversity. Yet one dimension receives surprisingly little attention: life experience. A classroom filled entirely with students who followed the same path—high school straight to college—may hold tremendous talent. But it is remarkably homogeneous in one respect. Whatever their geography, race, religion, or politics, most traditional undergraduates are at roughly the same stage of life. Students who arrive after military service, careers, or family responsibilities bring perspectives coursework cannot replicate. They have encountered responsibility, hardship, leadership, and sacrifice in ways many of their classmates have not. That does not make them better students. It makes them different students. And different is often precisely what higher education needs. Universities speak constantly about preparing students for citizenship in a pluralistic society. One of the most effective ways to do that is remarkably simple: put students in classrooms with people whose experiences are unlike their own. After nearly two decades teaching, I’ve learned that the most memorable contributions rarely come from the students with the highest test scores. They come from those who have lived enough to ask questions no one else thinks to raise. A 19-year-old may have read about leadership. A veteran has exercised it. A traditional undergraduate may have discussed sacrifice in a seminar. A service member has lived it. The value extends well beyond national security, shaping conversations about responsibility, community, work, duty, and human flourishing. This is why the best collegiate experiences have always been more than knowledge-delivery systems. They are places of formation. The purpose of college is not the transmission of information but the cultivation of judgment—and judgment develops through encounters with people who have seen what you have not. Students learn from professors, books, and libraries. But they also learn from one another. The roommate from another state. The classmate from another faith. The student who took an unconventional path before arriving on campus. These interactions are not incidental to education: they are education. I know this from the other side of the desk. In graduate school, I studied alongside servicemen, and they were invaluable. I still turn over things they taught me, ideas they brought to the table that I would never have reached on my own. I remain in their debt, and I value their difference. That is the whole point of higher education. Unfortunately, higher education tends to measure diversity through categories that are easier to count than life experience. It is far simpler to tabulate demographics than to weigh what a student gained by serving in the military, raising children, or caring for family before enrolling. Yet the very qualities universities claim to prize—resilience, maturity, leadership, civic commitment—are often abundant among these students. Which raises an uncomfortable question. If universities genuinely value diversity of perspective, why are there so few veterans on elite campuses? The share of veterans at America’s most selective institutions remains remarkably small. At the same time, those institutions lament political polarization, civic fragmentation, and intellectual conformity. These concerns may not be unrelated. Part of why many Americans distrust elite institutions is that they seem disconnected from large parts of American life. Veterans, adult learners, and other nontraditional students help bridge that gap. They bring experience from communities, workplaces, and families that traditional students rarely encounter, broadening conversations and challenging assumptions. Institutions should do more than accommodate such students. They should actively welcome them. Programs for veterans, transfer students, and nontraditional learners deserve support not merely because they expand access, but because they enrich the education of everyone around them. The Marine I met at Yale will earn a degree. But his classmates may receive something just as valuable: four years learning alongside someone whose life has demanded service, sacrifice, and discipline. If universities are serious about preparing students for citizenship, they should want more of those encounters, not fewer. Higher education spends enormous energy searching for diversity. Sometimes it is already standing in the classroom. We simply have to learn to recognize it. The post The Diversity We Forgot to Value appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .