TIME TO SHUT UP ABOUT HARVARD.

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor puts the request more politely.  "Stop Conflating Elite Schools with All Schools!"

It's a familiar argument, dear reader.

Ben Casselman: "A focus on elite schools ignores the issues most college students face."

That's long been my theme.  Mr Casselman's post is full of links, including links by way of endnotes (!) and he recognizes that for most collegians, the community colleges, regional comprehensives, and mid-majors are the relevant universe.  (I hope the footnotes work properly.  If not, read Mr Casselman's article.  I'm a railroad mechanic, not a coder!)

Professor Taylor, whose experience is at Alabama's Troy State,  starts with a specific hot topic of early summer.

It may be that there is a discussion to be had about the enrollment sizes at Harvard or Princeton. Maybe there is a conversation to be had about the percentage of international students at those schools. But those are complex and nuanced discussions that are not being fostered by the Trump administration’s blanket attack on international students.

His complaint, however, is more general.

[T]he NYT and its ilk constantly publish op/eds about higher education that almost always come from the POV of the most elite schools.

There are over 2,000 4-year colleges or universities in the United States. Of those, there are the elite Ivies, some other elite private schools, and a number of elite public flagships; there are also a huge number of schools, indeed the vast majority, that do not fall in this camp. And yet, it often feels like the NYT has only heard of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with Stanford occasionally tossed in for regional diversity.

There are debates to be had about the role of the most elite schools in our social, economic, and political lives. But if we are going to talk about higher ed in a general sense, we need to understand that “higher ed” is not just The Most Elite Schools + The AP Top 25 in Football (or, really, the Top 10).

He's right, and there's a study or six to be written about the dynamics by which graduate programs at Troy State or Northern Illinois fill up with international students and whether there's something different about the applicants for graduate or undergraduate study in the mid-majors vis-a-vis the matriculants at the most elite schools, and whether a Trumpian blunderbuss aimed at Princeton and Troy alike is good policy.  His complaint about the Times also has a long pedigree.  "Times, if you’re the least bit serious about higher education -- a colossal ‘if,’ I’ll admit -- would it actually, physically kill you to acknowledge the colleges to which most Americans go? And when you do, could it please be in the same section of the paper as the stories about safety schools and selective admissions?"

Personnel managers at the Gray Lady, though, probably don't even send recruiters to the safety schools, perhaps because they grasp the U.S. News problem.

Thus, when Chicago State is a dropout factory with a corrupt administration, when Valdosta State sells itself as "endless possibilities for outdoor fun" while sanctioning a student for protesting a parking lot, when Palm Beach State is a dropout factory with thought police, it is these academic gulags that deserve special attention, for operating academic gulags that promise but fail to deliver upward advancement, it matters. To repeat: students at Dartmouth or Berkeley or Northern Illinois know how to stand up for themselves.

And when (to scroll through University Diaries) Louisville or North Carolina or Kentucky or Mississippi State or Tennessee put beer-'n-circus and seat licenses ahead of academics, it matters.

To Professor Taylor's point: the three institutions in the first paragraph above live in that part of higher education that the Times ignores, whilst the five listed in the second paragraph might qualify, at least to people who follow college basketball.  We have the U.S. News problem, though, because those eight institutions represent a more troubling phenomenon: whether as academic gulags or as party schools, they contribute to the flight to perceived quality that makes Trumpian mercantilism, in the form of protecting more admission slots in the Ivies for Trump voters, a winning message.