The NYT has some of the best education reporters in the country, but stories like this are why so many people who work in and around higher ed see it as a force for harm.
There are thousands of homeless college students. But they NYT thinks choice real estate is what this moment is about. Most students are not "renting giant houses with friends — sometimes in far-flung locales."
People are worrying that they will be evicted right now, but "groups of students have named their college houses and made them social media official, creating shared accounts where they plan to post about their lives together."
Schools mentioned in this piece:
Yale
Grinnell
MIT
Columbia
Harvard
GW
Dartmouth
Williams
UC, Berkeley
Princeton
UNC, Chapel Hill
Penn
UCSD
Brown
Duke
Stanford
Middlebury
Michigan, Ann Arbor
U of Ottawa (he's living with 3 friends in Ireland)
So what? It's just one story, and it is happening. Sure. But the weight of the NYT is heavy and what it chooses to write about will strike some readers as typical or representative.
Watch how this story gets shared on FB and people start talking about "what college students are doing now," when the reality is that the colleges and experiences mentioned here are far from typical or representative. Same for the demographics of those pictures.
Final note: the reporter who wrote this thing is not an education reporter. There are so many great higher ed reporters out there, some who have lost their jobs during this pandemic.
Can we leave the education stories to the experts please?
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