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Higher Education and Consumerism
Students or Consumers?
The most obvious symptom of the corporatization of higher education is the transition of seeing students as students to seeing students as customers.
This consumerism is problematic.
While I can understand that the institution (and the instructors) have an obligation to the students, the institution also has an obligation to the community, the state, and the country. After all, the tuition dollars a student pays are not the only fiduciary concern.
Taxes from the community, the state, and the federal government are used to support public higher education in this country. In short, the students are not the only stakeholder in this economic equation.
In the ACTA’s 2014–15 What Will They Learn? Report, researchers found that students are no longer expected to take “core courses” but are now choosing from a “distribution” model where students are required to pick a series of classes from a list.
The issue, according to the report, is that students are not taking more focused requirements that address core collegiate skills and knowledge. This is largely due to giving the customer “more choices” when it comes to their education.
