I'm not sure what this means.

My claim is that educational programs designed for the top 1% of students are not well-suited to educating the next 10%. And vice-versa. (E.g.: A Chicago math student is often not well-served by the sort of "calculus for engineers" courses you'll find at state college branch campuses. Also, a college senior struggling through their Calculus requirement is not at all well-served by Chicago's honors mathematics program. Neither approach is better in an absolute sense; but in each case, one is clearly better relative to the particular student.)

This is not some sort of tautology. It's a serious pedagogical hypothesis with decades of empirical research probing its truth value.

> They are showing up to civil war reenactments with tanks and planes.

I can't speak to Purdue specifically. In the cases I know about, the very explicit purpose of these alternative degree programs is to build a department by admitting students that the name-brand program rejects, or who fail out of the weeder courses. The "old timers" aren't in a huff about it, because they had no interest in admititng those students to their existing programs in the first place.