MANCHESTER, Conn.

EVERYONE KNOWS about the transformation of the University of Connecticut at Storrs. The original cow college in the country with dingy and leaky buildings now is ranked among America’s top 25 public universities, with spectacular new instructional buildings and residence halls and an array of modern amenities, all of which are attracting better students and keeping them in the state, exactly what the transformation was undertaken for. Of course, the university’s top-tier basketball programs and now its football program have helped achieve this and now publicize it around the world.

But without much fanfare a similar transformation is under way just down the road from Storrs in Willimantic, the essential struggling old mill town, where Eastern Connecticut State University is no longer an unremarkable teachers college in UConn’s shadow.

Connecticut’s commitment to rebuild its higher education system only began with UConn. It lately has been extended to the four outlying colleges of the state university system, and Eastern has been transformed perhaps even more than UConn has been, even as its new buildings look very much like UConn’s — beautiful new residence halls (apartment suites, not mere dormitories), a $46 million science building emphasizing the study of sustainable energy, a glorious 73,000-square-foot student center, and a 40,000-square-foot Child and Family Development Resource Center.

Eastern is a small fraction of UConn’s size geographically and has only a quarter as many students, about 4,000 students, but that may increase Eastern’s appeal. For with its new buildings and lovely grounds Eastern is starting to evoke the idealized New England college setting. The university shrewdly shows itself off by hosting Connecticut’s Boys and Girls State conventions each summer, during which leading high-school students from throughout the state and their parents get a pleasant shock: This is not your father’s Willimantic.

Willimantic itself is not yet even close to Amherst, Middlebury, or even Middletown, home to Wesleyan University. The old mill town still has a lot of poverty, and its Main Street remains funky. But there is evidence, such as restaurants, that people are working to bring the town back. While UConn is striving to build a commercial district adjacent to the university to help keep students and faculty around on weekends, Eastern already has a downtown just a few short blocks down the hill. The transformation of Eastern suggests that, with some ingenuity and cooperation, Willimantic too might be transformed before too long — into a college town.

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Like similar municipal ordinances in Connecticut and around the nation, Manchester’s “living wage” ordinance dreamily presumed that everyone employed by a local government contractor should be paid enough to support a family of four — and indeed everyone should be paid that much, just as rain should not fall on holiday weekends, and wishes should be horses so we all might ride. But of course not every job actually produces enough to support a family of four, and many jobs, requiring no special skills or experience, ever could.

Manchester’s “living-wage” ordinance itself seemed to recognize as much, since it included exceptions and waiver provisions. When, recently, Manchester’s Board of Directors was asked by the town’s insurer to waive the ordinance for it because the insurer has employees in other states who are not paid enough to support a family of four, even the ordinance’s supporters on the board were prepared to go along, for otherwise the town would have had to switch insurers, which would have cost the town a lot of money.

That is, not even the ordinance’s supporters on the board really believed in the “living wage” concept that much — not to the point of turning Manchester’s town government into a social-welfare agency transferring income from townspeople to people all over the world.

Recognizing that the ordinance was both silly posturing and a constant risk of financial liability, the Republican majority on the board repealed it the other day on a 5-4 party-line vote.

While the national government’s economic policy long has been reducing the incomes of most people, incomes policy belongs to the national government and state government, not to municipal government. For an incomes policy at the municipal level can only put a municipality at a disadvantage to everywhere else. Indeed, a municipality can best support the incomes of its residents simply by getting value for their municipal taxes, and getting value means not overpaying, not pretending, as the “living wage” ordinance did, that every job produces enough of value to support a family of four.

Chris Powel, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.