These last few years have seen a sea change in higher education, from an emphasis on attracting not only the best and the brightest, but more recently, the best, brightest, and least well off. In light of these trends, Cornell is beset on both sides by competitive pressures: on the one hand, from traditional measures of selectivity like those published in the U.S. News and World Report magazine, and on the other hand, by the new emphasis on generous financial aid packages.

Prior to the “financial-aid bidding war,” as The New York Times recently dubbed the past four years, the most renowned colleges and universities were also said to be the most desirable. To this day, the standard markers used by the U.S. News rankings — acceptance rates, average SAT/ACT scores, graduation rates, and alumni giving rates, to name a few — consider higher education mostly from the perspective of an elite applicant, in which prestige is paramount.

While such measures of “the best” have consistently landed Harvard, Yale and Princeton on the top of the rankings, they have also raised major issues of access and representation in higher education. As Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley writes, the Big Three institutions remain “among the least economically diverse of the nation’s major research universities.”

In Harvard’s case, as the Times reported, “high-achieving poor students … are much less likely to apply to elite colleges than their affluent counterparts.” And even after Princeton eliminated all student loans in 1998, fewer than 7 percent of the student body came from families earning under $45,000. By 2005, that figure was only 7.7 percent, and today, it is closer to 10.

During this time, Cornell achieved only middling rankings from U.S. News, consistently underperforming most of its Ivy League peers. As of 2008, Cornell was tied at 12th place with Washington University in St. Louis, and beat out by every Ivy except Brown.

At the same time, we have put together a more economically diverse student body than our prestigious peers. Last fall, the University enrolled 1,799 students who were eligible for Pell Grants from the federal government — meaning that 13.3 percent of the undergraduate student body came from families earning below $45,000 per year. As Deputy Provost David Harris said, “Cornell’s financial-aid population is larger than the entire undergraduate population student bodies of a number of our fellow institutions.”

An emphasis on class diversity, even if unnoticed in the press, is in fact consistent with Cornell’s approach toward admissions, which is far more democratic than that of competitor schools.

“Essentially, Cornell tries to admit as many students as we can without over-enrolling,” associate provost for admissions and enrollment Doris Davis told the Sun. “I think some of the peer schools try to admit as few students as possible,” she said.

This “any person … any study” philosophy, while a boon to our application numbers, does not endear us to the mechanical rankings survey. While a record-high 33,011 students applied to Cornell this year — over 10,000 more than applied to Columbia — we also accepted 6,370 students, more than Harvard, Yale and Princeton combined. Moreover, our expected “yield” — that is, the percentage of those admitted who ultimately matriculate — is about 45 percent, a far cry from Harvard’s 80 percent yield last year.

With all this in mind, one would have thought that the new “democratic” spirit permeating higher education — a movement, we should remember, that started in the chambers of the U.S. Senate — would cast a friendly spotlight on Cornell.

Instead, just the opposite has happened.

In a matter of months, the leading universities announced a spate of financial aid incentives, culminating in the wealthiest of universities, Harvard and Yale among them, eliminating loans for families earning under $60,000 and offering significant scholarships to families making as much as $180,000. Today, as the Times reports, Harvard is only as expensive as the average state university for all but the most affluent 3 or 4 percent of the nation’s population.

Toward the tail end of these pledges, and under mounting pressure from Congress and its student body, Cornell announced its own financial aid policy: no loans for families earning under $75,000, and a cap on annual loans of $3,000 for families with incomes under $120,000 per year, taking effect in 2009.

In her Academic State of the University address last month, Provost Biddy Martin warned that, “We can worry about our rankings, or we can be who we are and define our value in our own terms, taking advantage of what makes Cornell unique.”

For a long time, what made Cornell unique was a rhetorical and results-oriented approach to access in higher education. While peer schools rested largely on their laurels, we should have looked to our own laurels, and come out ahead of the other Ivies in financial aid innovation.

Now, by either paradigm of success — the U.S. News rankings, or the financial aid bidding war — Cornell is a follower, and not a leader. Our acceptance rate, at around 20 percent this year, is far higher than Harvard’s 7 percent, while our per-pupil financial aid packages will be the lowest in the Ivy League next year.

Contrary to Provost Martin’s desire for Cornell to compete “on the basis of our strengths and our values,” we have failed to compete because of our shortsightedness and timidity. Because of disadvantages in resources and reputation, Cornell will never be able to compete on Harvard’s terms. What we can do, however, is take advantage of — and not pass up on — opportunities to frame the debate, or in Martin’s words, “define our value in our own terms.”

Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rfishman@cornellsun.com. Agree to Disagree appears Wednesdays.