The Corporatization of Higher Education

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



The Corporatization of Higher Education
By Nicolaus Mills - Fall 2012


In 2003, only two colleges charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, room, and board. Six years later more than two hundred colleges charged that amount. What happened between 2003 and 2009 was the start of the recession. By driving down endowments and giving tax-starved states a reason to cut back their support for higher education, the recession put new pressure on colleges and universities to raise their price.

When our current period of slow economic growth will end is anybody’s guess, but even when it does end, colleges and universities will certainly not be rolling back their prices. These days, it is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.

If corporatization meant only that colleges and universities were finding ways to be less wasteful, it would be a welcome turn of events. But an altogether different process is going on, one that has saddled us with a higher-education model that is both expensive to run and difficult to reform as a result of its focus on status, its view of students as customers, and its growing reliance on top-down administration. This move toward corporatization is one that the late University of Montreal professor Bill Readings noted sixteen years ago in his study, The University in Ruins, but what has happened in recent years far exceeds the alarm he sounded in the 1990s.

Rank Tyranny

The most visible sign of the corporatization of higher education lies in the commitment that colleges and universities have made to winning the ratings war perpetuated by the kinds of ranking U.S. News and World Report now offers in its annual “Best Colleges” guide. Since its relatively modest debut in 1983, the “Best Colleges” guide has grown in influence. For any number of small colleges, getting traction from the “Best Colleges” guide may be a dream, but for a wide range of middle-tier and upper-tier colleges and universities, winning a good “Best Colleges” ranking is considered so essential to success that it shapes internal policies. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-corporatization-of-higher-education

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[ladjf]

2. Just another part of the strategy by the rich and religious looney to turn America into a

Theocracy. nt