The ‘Flagship’ Folly The nautical metaphor is a shoddy classifier of colleges — but a clear signal of higher ed’s obsession with status. Dave Plunkert for The Chronicle The Review April 28, 2021 American higher education is full of jargon. We have all kinds of bamboozling lingo to categorize different types of colleges: SLACs, HBCUs, R1s, MSIs, PWIs, “mega-universities” — the list goes on. While many of these terms are helpful, others are less so. Consider, for instance, “elite” colleges. This term suggests everyone has agreed on which institutions are “elite” and what their features might be. That, of course, is not the case. Another misfire, somewhere near the top of this pantheon of parlance, is “flagship.”