Elite colleges have long viewed themselves as bastions of meritocratic excellence – only to realize in later decades that they were in fact excluding large numbers of deserving students. In the past, the excluded students included women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Jews, Catholics and others. Today, the excluded students tend to be low-income. Is the situation on the cusp of changing?

David Leonhardt is a columnist at The New York Times and the editor of The Upshot, a Times website covering politics, policy and other subjects. In 2011, he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for his economic columns. He is the author of the e-single, “Here’s the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth,” an Amazon.com and New York Times bestseller. David was previously a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the newspaper’s Washington Bureau Chief.

Before joining The Times in 1999, he worked for Business Week magazine and The Washington Post. He studied applied mathematics at Yale and is a third-generation native of New York. His Twitter handle is @DLeonhardt.