So strong were Dartmouth’s ties to the trees that it got the nickname “The College of a Thousand Elms.” Then, one by one, the College had to cut them down. By the 1980s, more than 200 had been lost.

Education is often viewed as a driver of income mobility, also known as continuity. Perhaps economics Nobel laureate and former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said it best in a 2006 ...