Usually I read the morning papers with no particular emotional investment in the news. I read. Some articles are interesting. Occasionally I am led to pursue further research on a subject. Facts, figures and a few interesting tidbits are stored in the mental data banks, but usually it is a quiet process.
This morning however I was ready to spit, over a very minor issue granted, but still, it ticked me off. Our local paper The Poughkeepsie Journal, reported, like everyone else, on the release of the US News and World Reports college rankings. No problem there. Then I came to this paragraph:
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Emphasis on the last sentence is mine. Now within a minute. I had looked up the US News rankings online and determined the rankings of all other local colleges. If I, a reader can easily find that information, I would think someone at the Poughkeepsie Journal could do so as well. If they are going to bother looking up one college they should look up the rest, or if they are only going to look up colleges in Poughkeepsie, the home of The Journal, they could look up both Marist and Vassar College which are both located in Poughkeepsie. I can even understand skipping Bard as it is, let’s say, 30 miles away.
Once again the Poughkeepsie Journal displays shoddy journalism, there are more examples than I care to enumerate, and the general local tendency to praise Marist and decry Vassar annoys me to no end. Granted Marist draws from a primarily regional population and Vassar does not. But both put money, education, and added value back into this community. And despite common myths, Vassar does accept students from local schools, and many Vassar graduates work and live in this community. My bias is not completely based on my status as a Vassar graduate. I grew up in a "town and gown" community and I think the whole phenomenon is narrow minded and stupid, even though I can see how it arose. I can certainly say that the situation must have been worse when students drawn to elite colleges, or any colleges were more affluent than the local residents, but in an age where most college students receive financial aid, a much larger percentage of the population goes to college, and colleges themselves are taking a greater look at their roll in their communities, this kind of narrow-minded bias should be decreasing. Even if resentment exists, it should not be exploited by local institutions that should know better.
End of rant for today.