In a Buyer’s Market, Colleges Become Fluent in the Language of Business – NYTimes.com

• In a Buyer’s Market, Colleges Become Fluent in the Language of Business – NYTimes.com

  Students and parents are the customer and since they are footing most of the bill should be discerning about the college they will attend in the fall. 

  tags: education undergraduate degree college business tuition fees books debts

  • Higher education is today less a rite of passage in which institutions serve in loco parentis, and more a commercial transaction between school and student.

  • Robert Zemsky, a professor at the Graduate School of Education of the University of Pennsylvania. “It has crystallized the understanding that higher education is a market,” and in a market, the goal is to beat the competition.

  • Traditional nonprofit colleges and universities like to think of themselves as producing not just workers but citizens, rounded contributors to society, and students think that way, too, said M. Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.

  • “We’re a lot less sentimental about college than we used to be,” he said. “Much more than before, society tends to look at a college education as primarily a steppingstone to a job and prosperity, and there are things going on in the economy that have fueled this view.”

  • a growing number of college students come from low-income families that have more reason than their privileged peers to take a utilitarian view of education.

  • “but let’s face it, it’s really part of American culture, because we evaluate practically everything monetarily.”

  • And it is hard not to think of education as a commodity for sale in an era when colleges vie for students with promises not about the caliber of their academics, but also about the comfort of their dorms, the quality of their food and the amount of financial aid they can offer.

  • “Students everywhere are being treated more and more as clients and customers,” said Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University and the author of “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.” “Sometimes they’re coddled, sometimes exploited — usually some of both.”

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