After receiving my Ph.D. in 1974, I left Utah with a nice little list of innovations under my belt, but I was keenly aware that I’d only done all this in the service of a larger mutual goal. Like my classmates, the work I’d championed had taken hold largely because of the protective, eclectic, intensely challenging environment I’d been in. The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room.

And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy. When the federal government offers, for example, rental support in housing-scarce cities, landlords can raise their prices, leaving renters no better off. When it increases financial aid for spiralling college tuition costs, universities are able to eat part of that by raising their tuition. Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints. These are excellent ideas that I hope will be broadly adopted.

In contrast, in Renick’s early years at GSU he knew of several low-income students who were dropped from school for not meeting only one small bureaucratic requirement, never to be heard from again. These kinds of experiences brought Renick to an important insight: Academic ability was rarely the reason low-income students dropped out of college. It was mostly little things, potholes along the road to graduation. As Andrew Grumbel put it in Won't Lose This Dream, his compelling book describing the transformation of GSU: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, academic performance was not the most important predictor of student success or failure.

This book argues instead for a “wise” model of inclusion, as practiced at GSU and Berkley Chemistry: meeting the students or inductees where they are, with trust in their potential to develop and with a focus on giving them the red buttons— the information, know-how, resources, timely coaching, social capital, and so on— and showing them the way forward, all of which will enable them to stay in the setting and cope well. These things lower ambiguity and churn— as illustrated in Pat Neal’s effect on me, and in the effects of GSU and Berkley Chemistry’s institution-level strategies.

Could such misguidance be a root of the educational inequalities that trouble our society? Could an expanded paradigm— one that also focuses on building students’ trust in their school’s ability and willingness to invest in them— make a transformative difference?