When you declare that "studying things" is elitist, that's when you know your argument is cooked.
A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.
When such things are rightly levied in criticisms of academic ideological capture, the discussion reverts to the idea that the entire industry is nothing more than "studying things", as you put it, for knowledge and knowledge alone.
>A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.
You could say the same thing about a private-rank soldier, or a party secretary. The relatively low wages of one particular person is incidental to the main issue of the overall power structure, and who it serves.
“Elite” is traditionally a synonym for rich white men educated at Ivy League universities working comfortable, high-earning jobs. Those people still exist! Trump is one of them, as is George W Bush, and his father before him.
The better definition is simply that the elites of a nation are the ones that hold the most outsized political power, often the kind of intangible power that they are loathe to admit having. Trump is more or less attempting a small-scale revolution in America, being the replacement of one class of elites with another. What the prospective replacement class of elites looks like is harder to say than who they're attempting to replace.