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Blum warned that private universities such as Yale and Stanford threaten to poach academic superstars.

I believe, as a rule, these "academic superstars" are researchers and only secondarily teachers. Yes, it is nice that a university or college has a Nobel Laureate (one is available in 2017), but having such by itself does not raise the academic ability of the students! Remember the students, those walking piles of student loan debt? Year after tiresome year, the tuition increases have far outstripped inflation, yet in that same time frame, almost every measure shows American Students falling behind their foreign counterparts. Value for money paid appears to be absent from this equation.

You seem to think a university is the same thing as a college. By definition the faculty at a university must be first and foremost scholars (in the sciences we now call this "researchers") in their disciplines (or practicing artists in the case of the arts), not merely teachers of their discipline. Since the Middle Ages when the university became one of the great institutions of Western Civilization, that was the point of studying at university -- to study with people who actually defined the discipline, not mere copyists.

American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts not because of any failing in our universities (or colleges), save one, which is quite specific and concentrated, but because by the time they reach university, most American students have been ruined by American K-12 education.

The main contribution to American students' failings found at universities is the role of colleges of education is the destruction of American K-12 education -- by offering majors with less academic rigor than a major in art history, they funnel slackers into careers as school teachers, equipping them not with anything actually contributing to sound pedagogy, but with all the baleful educational theories emanating from the left (look-say as a substitute for phonics, Vygotskian "social construction of knowledge" claptrap, and whateve the latest way to miseducate children in mathematics is -- they keep changing -- and the like). And this could be fixed by the legislatures of the several states with "right to teach laws" that abolish the monopoly given colleges of education on producing certified teachers (or qualified teachers, or whatever the local term is).

Actually, the fact that those of us on the faculty of American universities are able to turn out as many American engineers and scientists starting with the raw-material the K-12 schools give us is a testimony to the quality of American universities.