America’s top colleges and universities fall all over themselves to recruit foreign students but American veterans? Not so much.

Wick Sloane of Slate reports.

G.I. Joe College

If you can believe it, the number of undergraduate veterans at the nation’s self-proclaimed most highly selective colleges is significantly fewer than we reported in 2011. The total this year: 168*. The * is because, again, too many of these colleges, the 31 invitation-only members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), don’t know. The number may bounce again.

“Disgraceful and absurd” is what I called the 232 total veterans in 2011. By comparison, the total number of veterans and dependents of veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill rose from 555,329 students in 2011 to 646,302 in 2012. From 232 to 174 to 168—with the nation at war and 118,784 total undergraduate seats at the 31 COFHE colleges.

Lost for synonyms, I asked Andrew Bacevich, retired U.S. Army colonel and author of Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, to describe the pitiful count of veterans at selective colleges. Bacevich is an eloquent critic of all of us—we, the people—for letting 1 percent of the population bear the nation’s military burden—fighting, deaths, and wounds.

“Here is an issue where the nation’s most prestigious institutions should demonstrate some leadership,” Bacevich said. “With a very few admirable exceptions, they have failed to do so. That failure is nothing less than shameful.” (Listen to Bacevich on The Colbert Report and on Moyers & Company.)

Some colleges had been including the combined totals of both veterans and veteran dependents and family members using the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill in their count of veteran students. In 2011, Cornell University reported 48 veterans, with just one confirmed veteran this year. Duke University reported 22 veterans in 2011 and one this year. Rice University originally reported having 27 veterans last year but then amended that number to one veteran last year and one this year. Northwestern University reported 45 undergraduates who are either veterans or dependents, with the administration relying on a student group to sort out the details.