The legal challenges to affirmative action now before the Supreme Court have received unprecedented public attention and taken on enormous symbolic importance for colleges. Yet what is rarely, if ever, acknowledged is the whiff of elitism that pervades the current debate.

Supporters of the University of Michigan, which has been sued for using racial preferences in its undergraduate and law-school admissions programs, warn that not only will this highly selective campus lose its ability to fashion a diverse student body, but a negative decision by the justices will have a long-term chilling effect on building diversity in all of higher education. They also imply that by not attending selective institutions, minority and other students will have reduced life chances, and the nation's well-being -- as measured by the number of talented minority graduates entering key leadership posts -- will be diminished.

For example, Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan, has said, "A ruling overturning Bakke could result in the immediate resegregation of our nation's top universities, both public and private." The American Council on Education's supporting brief insists that affirmative-action programs at the University of Michigan and similar institutions are responsible for producing "the cohort that will guide the nation in the vocations, educate those who will govern it, and meet this society's pressing needs. On their success the liberty, prosperity, and world leadership of the United States depends." And in a prize-winning book, The Shape of the River (Princeton University Press, 1998), two former Ivy League presidents -- William G. Bowen of Princeton University and Derek Bok of Harvard University -- analyzed 28 selective-admissions institutions and concluded that "the complete elimination of race in admissions would deal a blow to the historical aim of repairing the legacy of racial discord that has troubled the nation's republican heart."

But the University of Michigan and other elite institutions that practice highly selective admissions hardly represent the world of American higher education. The cases now before the Supreme Court hinge on Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which he said that racial quotas were illegal, but a college in a truly competitive admissions process might use race as one factor to promote a "diverse student body." Yet affirmative action, defined as access and opportunity, is practiced throughout most of American higher education with little or no resort to Bakke. While Michigan-style affirmative action may be necessary to create and sustain diversity at highly selective institutions, it is not relevant at most colleges. As Bowen and Bok reported, "the vast majority of undergraduate institutions accept all qualified candidates and thus do not award special status to any group of applicants, defined by race or on the basis of any other criteria."

The current edition of Peterson's Four-Year Colleges guide -- which classifies colleges by their degree of selectivity based on admitted students' test scores and high-school grades, and by acceptance rates -- places only 215 four-year colleges, or about 10 percent, in one of the top two categories. Surveys also show that two-year schools are overwhelmingly based on open admissions. For more than a century, land-grant colleges like mine, Utah State University, and other institutions defined by open and broad-based admissions processes have provided access and opportunity to the sons and daughters of farmers, ranchers, salespersons, laborers, bankers, lawyers, and car mechanics -- some of whom have been American Indian, Asian-American, African-American, and Hispanic people. And often in our state, those students have begun their educational journey in one of Utah's highly accessible two-year colleges.

To argue now that the diversification of American higher education will come to a screeching halt as a result of a negative decision in the Michigan cases seems strained, at best. The high court may decide against the University of Michigan, but such a ruling is unlikely to deflect the vast majority of institutions from their missions of opportunity. The contention that the outcome of the Michigan cases will change the face of higher education overlooks the historic route to opportunity that less-selective colleges have long provided.

We do not now, and never will, have to depend alone on a handful of highly selective institutions to produce our future leaders. A review of the 2003 Almanac of American Politics makes clear that the nation's political leaders most often receive their degrees from institutions that rely on broad-based admissions. More than 70 percent of the CEO's of America's top companies attended colleges that are best described as less selective in their admissions policies, according to Forbes magazine.

Are graduates of highly competitive universities like Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and Michigan in the top positions in many legislatures and corporations? Yes, of course. But the mainstream of American's political, business, and military leadership has been educated as undergraduates in institutions best known for admissions practices that are either open or modestly selective. An overwhelming number of minority ROTC graduates, for example, come from such colleges. The secretary of state and former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Colin Powell, is a graduate of the City University of New York and a product of ROTC. Meanwhile, some institutions that have written briefs in support of Michigan have proved hostile to even having ROTC on campus.

The debate about affirmative action and personal success also clouds the larger issue of student choice and motivation. Jay Mathews, an education writer for The Washington Post, has reported that graduates of more-selective colleges on average do have higher incomes, but their success appears to have little to do with the "choosiness" of the institution. Instead, they succeed because of personal habits and tendencies developed long before they started calculating their grade-point averages. According to Mathews, less-selective colleges, in fact, often do a better job than highly selective ones in preparing less-confident students for life; the academic competition tends to be friendlier and the teaching better.

Admissions policies by themselves, of course, do not write the entire text for the future of diversity in higher education. Many college presidents worry that a negative decision about affirmative action will hamper outreach programs that encourage pre-collegiate students from underrepresented minority groups to even consider higher education. While such concerns are appropriate, they are probably overstated. The decision in the Michigan cases will most likely hew closely to the admissions question, and, given the sharply divided nature of the Supreme Court, the justices are likely to issue an opinion that clarifies and limits affirmative action without eliminating it altogether.

The leaders of many public institutions, aware of the constituencies they serve, have decided that standing tall for Michigan-style affirmative action is the best way to underscore their bona fide commitment to a racially diverse higher-education system. Yet such a stance, while understandable, can easily deflect the public from grasping that the single greatest barrier to higher education for most students, and minority students especially, is not admissions policies. Rather, it is the inability of applicants to gain a sufficient financial foothold to enter and then graduate from any institution -- selective or not. At the same time that the Supreme Court ponders the fate of race-based admissions policies, budget shortfalls have prompted many states to slash spending on financial aid and raise tuition and fees.

Affirmative action as a legal proposition, while necessary, has hardly been sufficient by itself to resolve the larger needs of higher education in matters of diversity, access, and opportunity. Limited scholarship funds and rising tuition costs will prevent more than four million qualified high-school graduates this decade from attending four-year colleges, according to a recent report by Congress's Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. Among students from families with incomes of less than $25,000 a year, 48 percent do not go to four-year colleges and 22 percent do not pursue any higher education at all. In contrast, only 16 percent of such students from families with incomes exceeding $75,000 do not go to a four-year college, and only 4 percent fail to attend any institutions of higher education. The gap in participation between low- and upper-income students is the same as three decades ago, the report concludes, a period in which Bakke-style affirmative action has prevailed. Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at ACE, summed up the matter nicely with an observation in the Los Angeles Times that "smart poor kids go to college at the same rate as stupid rich kids, and that's a tragedy."

The participation gap is the crisis in higher education, one that has a direct impact on students from historically underrepresented groups, lower-income families, and families with little or no experience with college. The best "affirmative action" that we can practice to meet this crisis is to ensure that every student seeking higher education can afford it, and that colleges have the resources to give them the quality education that they deserve.

At least on the public side, the responsibility to do so rests squarely with the states that are now abandoning the social contract they forged with higher education long ago, a contract by which colleges kept tuition at a level that encouraged access and, in return, states provided subsidies like direct financial aid. But because higher education is a discretionary part of the state budget, tough economic times are forcing policy choices that invariably work against colleges. That situation must change if the institutions that have historically provided access and opportunity are to fulfill that role and maintain educational quality.

Whatever the outcome of the Michigan cases, the fate of minority and other students in nonelite institutions does not rest with the high court's decision. In the end, the single most important action that federal and state governments, along with individual colleges, can take is to provide more grants for students from low- and moderate-income families. Better financial support for needy students, and for the work of the colleges that strive day in and day out to provide educational opportunities for all students, will make the real difference.

Kermit L. Hall is president of Utah State University