Open the doors to college.

The bright line running through American society is higher education; generally speaking, those who have it are doing well, and those who don't, aren't. For 30-year-old men, the annual earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates is more than $13,000--nearly triple what it was 15 years ago. (Women with college degrees don't have as good a deal as men and women without college degrees have been less hurt by de-industrialization, so the female earnings gap is much smaller.) The dream of middling prosperity that animates American life has become substantially linked to access to higher education--it equals opportunity.

Despite all the hype about how hard it is to get into college, most bachelor-degree granting institutions are only minimally selective. The real filter between them and America's 18-year-olds is not academic ability; it's money. Anybody with well-off parents can go to college. For people without well-off parents, however, the shot at college is getting noticeably longer.

Access to higher education expanded tremendously after 1945, to the point where, unlike any other country in the world, we began to send most high school graduates on to more school. Remember, though, that the much-loved G.I. Bill was a package of veterans' benefits, not an educational-policy act. It implanted in the public's mind the idea that going to college was almost a basic right of citizenship. This was fine with the higher-education interests, because it gave them a rationale for growth; and as the universities began turning out exponentially more people, businesses began using them as managerial hiring halls, turning an undergraduate degree into a credential for a white-collar job. But we never did decide politically who was going to be given the right to higher education. The result is that widespread access is almost assumed--yet quite fragile.

Congress is preparing to cut back substantially on direct federal tuition grants to poor students, and also on funding for student loans. The cost of loans will go up when President Clinton's eliminate-the-middleman direct processing is abolished and banks get the job back. In private universities, "need-blind" admissions, never very widespread, have been quietly dropped in most places. Only a handful of universities practice true need-blind admissions today. Public university tuition is still much lower than private, but it has been rising in recent years. In 1980, tuition at all the best state universities was less than $1,000, and in some cases (the University of Texas at Austin, for example) it was less than $500. Today state university tuitions are beginning to hit the $3,000 mark; the University of Virginia costs more than $3,500. This doesn't even count room and board. The effect is to take public universities out of the realm of being almost like public high schools, part of the package government provides to all citizens.

Clinton only occasionally touches on the un-democratization of access to college in his speeches. The Republicans almost never mention it. What's odd about this is that access to college is not an abstract, faraway, dreamy issue for most Americans. It is the crucial point around which they orient their lives as they raise children. Opportunity in the narrow, self-interested sense as well as the larger social sense is involved. Why don't presidential candidates realize this?

Let me make clear that I'm not calling on presidential candidates to propose a scheme to expand higher education to the point where there's a space for every single high school graduate. (What we ought to be giving every single high school graduate is a diploma that employers trust enough to use as a hiring credential.) The issue isn't universal higher education, it's universal access to higher education for those with the demonstrated ability and drive to get something out of it--but without parents who have the money to pay for it. College is the main way to get ahead in this country. It profoundly contravenes the American ideal to make it unavailable to those who deserve it.

Nicholas Lemann is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.