WASHINGTON, D.C. — To play a more meaningful role on the higher education landscape, public urban universities must adopt missions of civic engagement, produce graduates needed by local businesses and reach out to students in high school to let them know that college is within reach.

Those were among the bits of advice from three college presidents who spoke Friday at the University of the District of Columbia for a conference called “Washington, Race and Public Higher Education.”

The three college presidents offered their advice during a session titled “The Possibilities and Limits of the University over the Coming Decades.”

While the lessons shared were in some ways general, often times the three college presidents tailored their remarks specifically to the session moderator — UDC Chancellor Dr. Allen Sessoms — who convened the conference as part of his ongoing mission to reposition UDC amid lingering questions about its propriety and effectiveness as an institution.

The college presidents focused largely on issues of institutional identity.

“What defines a university is not that it is in a city, but of the city ... the degree to which it embraces the city in which it exists,” said William Hynes, president of Holy Names University in Oakland, Calif.

Hynes shared experiences that Holy Names has had in doing outreach to prospective students in Oakland and the surrounding area.

“The biggest challenges are the young people,” Hynes said. “Particularly in high school, they have a perception, too many of them, that they cannot go to college, and if they could, they could not pay for it, not knowing that we discount 50 percent at the undergraduate level.”