“I don’t usually ‘go after’ news stories and headlines but this one is such a bad mistake, and it so affected my Twitter feed (I was swindled too), that it deserves comment,” Tyler Cowenwrote Monday morning on his popular Marginal Revolution blog. Mr. Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard. The story that inspired him to comment is a March 16 New York Times report carrying the headline, “Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants.”

Mr. Cowen’s blog post is titled, “This one is a real blooper and I cannot let it pass by.” Readers may understand why. The Times elaborates on its headline in the story’s fifth paragraph when it reports: “Nearly 40 percent of colleges are reporting overall declines in applications from international students, according to a survey of 250 college and universities, released this week by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.”

Mr. Cowen decided to examine the survey for himself and discovered the following results published on the very first page of the report, listed first among its “key findings”: “39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers.”

The Times article, according to Mr. Cowen, “does not reproduce the more positive pieces of information, from its own cited study, which may be suggesting international applications are not down at all, or perhaps down by only a small amount. If you look at all the data, they probably are down, but by no conceivable stretch of the imagination should the 40% figure be reported without the other numbers.”

The George Mason professor added in his Monday morning dispatch, “I look forward to not only a correction but in fact a retraction of the entire article and its headline.” He may have to wait a while. As of mid-day Wednesday, the article remained on the Times website with the same headline and the same incomplete summary of the survey findings.