Portraying higher education as a business
is the dominant metaphor for higher education in our time. By now it is
commonplace to consider students as consumers, faculty as producers, degrees and
publications as products, while universities labor to protect their brand.
To some extent, US higher education has
always functioned at least partially as a market, with institutions vying for
faculty, students, and funding. Clark
Kerr defines responsiveness to the market as a fundamental characteristic
of institutions in the American system, and calls it a “gift of history”. However,
in concert with the historical US marketization of education has been the
longstanding philosophical tradition from Thomas Jefferson, to John Dewey and
more recently to others such as Henry Giroux, of the assumption that democracy
demands education as a public good.
In response to the encroachment of
corporate power into the public sphere of education, Giroux
called for educators and others to mobilize a civic dialogue providing an
alternative conception of the meaning and purpose of public education in resistance
to the rise of corporate influence. For-profit higher education represents
perhaps the clearest manifestation of this encroachment, as the for-profit higher
education institution is a company or
corporation. Despite the staggering growth in the for-profit higher education
industry in recent years, alternative civic dialogues are not often voiced
within the academy. Instead, the
criticisms of proprietary institutions are more often located in the popular
press, documentaries,
or Congressional
reports, and
tend to center on issues of student loan repayment, graduation rates, and
admissions activities. These are essentially unfair business practices, with
the larger, far more significant concerns of race, power, and politics, left largely
unexplored. Within many of these
narratives, avoiding fraudulent behavior seems to be the sole standard that
society demands of higher education. In
fact, some voices advocate for public and other institutions to emulate the “efficiencies”
of the corporate
model.
Yet, if we look at the for-profit sector
of higher education, it is clear that the exponential growth in the industry is
far from evenly distributed. Rather, it has occurred primarily in groups that
are traditionally underrepresented in higher education. Currently, the University
of Phoenix is the largest educator of minority students. In fact, for-profit
institutions enroll a disproportionate share of non-Asian minority, low-income,
and female students. The for-profit industry hails this accomplishment as
“access,” yet questions about what exactly their students have gained access to
seem to go unasked.
Publicly traded, and yet publicly funded
through federal and state student loans, this sector of higher education
demonstrates what waits at the bottom of the slippery slope of marketization in
higher education. Absorbing roughly 30%
of the federal student loan funds plus multiple private loans in many cases,
and then spending approximately 25% of the budget on marketing, the for-profit
sector demonstrates the incongruity of shareholder profits and the public good
(see Harkin
Report). Standard criticisms of the for-profit model highlight the higher
tuitions, low graduation rates, high percentages of part-time faculty, high
student loan defaults, and frequent indictments for fraud. Yet, by allowing business practices to become
the center of the debate, critics have seemingly acquiesced to the corporate
instrumentalist vision of education, at least for large numbers of minorities
and non-traditional students who enroll in such programs, accepting that for
those students at least, getting a job upon graduation that pays enough to service
student loan repayments is enough. Elements of racism and even a kind of Social
Darwinism permeate some of this discourse, where prepackaged curriculum taught
by part-time faculty in abandoned store fronts, or online, counts as “access to
higher education” for minority students who for reasons that remain unstated,
“could not be served” by traditional public institutions. Capacity within the
public system is often cited as the justification for tolerating this system,
but such an excuse rings hollow in a nation that originated massification of
higher education and is widely regarded as the leader in higher education
worldwide.
For their part, public institutions espouse
diversity and tout carefully calculated minority and traditionally underserved
students. However, there is little to no consideration for the issues raised by
a profit driven industry feeding off the raging need for higher education left
unmet by the current public and private non-profit system. Moreover, research
on for-profit institutions and the students they serve is scant. Policing only
the “consumer protection” fundamentals of the programs seems to assuage the sense
of responsibility of the academy, public institutions, government, and society
in general to rectify the exclusions from civic engagement that the for-profit,
instrumentalist manifestation of higher education perpetuates.
Giroux called for “educators [to]
confront the march of corporate power by resurrecting a noble tradition,
extending from Horace Mann to Martin Luther King Jr, that affirms education as
a political process encouraging people to identify themselves as more than
consuming subjects, and democracy as more than a spectacle of market culture” (2001). While the fraudulent practices of some
proprietary institutions are certainly egregious, the issues of “gainful
employment” must not be allowed to dominate the discussion. Instead, the debate should also consider true
issues of access centered on larger social realities of power and oppression. The
debate should consider alternate conceptions of higher education in America
that would provide access for all. Without resistance to the continued vocationalization
of higher education for minority and other non-traditional students, without
demands for noncommercial goals for higher education including minority and non-traditional
students of all ages, and without insistence on the integral and potentially
transforming role of faculty as more than messengers delivering a pre-packaged
product of mass produced curriculum, democracy and the institutions originally
designed to serve it, have been reduced to mere spectacle in this market
culture.
By: Allison Witt
2 comments:
I was always supporting privately owned education. Good schools, no matter whether private or public, they will defend themselves with the success of their graduates. Ivy League doesn't complain, I guess.
The Ivy League schools are private, but not for-profit like Phoenix (although they can be accused of increasingly behaving that way). Also, there's a good argument to be made that elite schools are good largely because they attract good students. But Dr. Witt points out that the for-profits can't stand on the success of their students.
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