@wcmom1958 What exactly do you see as Bowdoin’s “different priorities” than Vassar? And what point is a good one? The premise of Gladwell’s piece is fundamentally wrong, not just hyperbolic. Perhaps it may not be wrong for a college somewhere, who knows, but not for the one he profiled. It seems like he or his producers started with a premise and worked backwards – reading through a list of non-academic things a college can be ranked on, thinking food sounded particularly trivial and then assuming that if the food is good it must mean they are wasting money on it at the expense of something more important. Then find a single stat to justify that claim, take it out of context and intentionally ignore all the facts that contradict it. If the root assertions are false, as they are here, it’s really impossible to judge if the overall thesis is legitimate. Perhaps some schools do waste money on food, dorms, or whatever, at the expense of student aid. But since there is no correlation at all in the one example he gave, how do we know?