Mary Kupiec Cayton: The Commodification of Wisdom
[Mary Kupiec Cayton is chair of the department of history and a professor of history and American studies at Miami University.]
... Trained as a historian of American intellectual and religious history, I increasingly find myself also a student of the market. I work with spreadsheets that transform teaching and learning into quantifiable units, and with advertising strategies that try to brand what my university offers as distinctive, even as market pressures move us toward standardization of our product. I understand why consumers want the guarantees afforded by standardization. What my fellow service providers and I offer — a college degree — will be vital to individual economic well-being in the 21st century. Accountability matters.
Regulation of goods and services comes both from free trade and from government intervention, and in higher education these days, we are seeing both. For example, many for-profit universities are driving down the cost of instruction by outsourcing it to part-time workers, often with lesser qualifications than those of faculty members at more traditional four-year degree-granting institutions. In so doing, those universities are forcing a reconsideration everywhere of how to cut labor costs in order to compete. At the level of government intervention, my own state, Ohio, has developed an articulation-and-transfer policy for postsecondary institutions that guarantees the ability of credits for certain courses — for instance, U. S. history surveys — to transfer between institutions and apply directly to the major at any public postsecondary institution in the state.
Professor Smith's lecture on Jamestown and Professor Jones's module on the Industrial Revolution, no matter where in the state they are taught, may now be considered educationally equivalent within a standardized delivery system meant to ensure that consumers receive common value for their tuition dollar. Your course is now educational legal tender, whether you take it at a selective university or at a community college; whether it is taught by a research professor with 25 years of teaching experience or by a temporary, part-time faculty member with a newly minted master's degree and no teaching expertise; whether it is taken in a small seminar setting or through an online venue where participants never physically meet.
The history of consumerism and commodities further suggests that as a mass market develops for certain goods and services, a luxury market often develops alongside it. The well-to-do seek out and consume scarce goods and services with which status becomes associated, and as those goods enter the mass market, the elite move on to identify new status-oriented consumables. For example, in Europe, for much of the 17th century, when coffee became popular as an exotic beverage, it was the drink of the rich. After a time, what once was a luxury became a staple of the masses. As a "cuppa joe" replaced the refined "dish of coffee," the more well-to-do moved on to designer brews and beverages. In the United States today, whether you buy your coffee at McDonald's or your Sumatra-grown cappuccino at Starbucks speaks volumes about how you see yourself culturally.
Have we arrived at a point in higher education where we will see increasing divergence between degrees meant for the masses and those for the elites? How will a Wal-Mart-type degree ("Always low prices") differ from high-end products with status value à la Lord & Taylor ("The Signature of American Style") and those targeted, Macy's-like, to folks in the middle ("Way to Shop!")?...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
... Trained as a historian of American intellectual and religious history, I increasingly find myself also a student of the market. I work with spreadsheets that transform teaching and learning into quantifiable units, and with advertising strategies that try to brand what my university offers as distinctive, even as market pressures move us toward standardization of our product. I understand why consumers want the guarantees afforded by standardization. What my fellow service providers and I offer — a college degree — will be vital to individual economic well-being in the 21st century. Accountability matters.
Regulation of goods and services comes both from free trade and from government intervention, and in higher education these days, we are seeing both. For example, many for-profit universities are driving down the cost of instruction by outsourcing it to part-time workers, often with lesser qualifications than those of faculty members at more traditional four-year degree-granting institutions. In so doing, those universities are forcing a reconsideration everywhere of how to cut labor costs in order to compete. At the level of government intervention, my own state, Ohio, has developed an articulation-and-transfer policy for postsecondary institutions that guarantees the ability of credits for certain courses — for instance, U. S. history surveys — to transfer between institutions and apply directly to the major at any public postsecondary institution in the state.
Professor Smith's lecture on Jamestown and Professor Jones's module on the Industrial Revolution, no matter where in the state they are taught, may now be considered educationally equivalent within a standardized delivery system meant to ensure that consumers receive common value for their tuition dollar. Your course is now educational legal tender, whether you take it at a selective university or at a community college; whether it is taught by a research professor with 25 years of teaching experience or by a temporary, part-time faculty member with a newly minted master's degree and no teaching expertise; whether it is taken in a small seminar setting or through an online venue where participants never physically meet.
The history of consumerism and commodities further suggests that as a mass market develops for certain goods and services, a luxury market often develops alongside it. The well-to-do seek out and consume scarce goods and services with which status becomes associated, and as those goods enter the mass market, the elite move on to identify new status-oriented consumables. For example, in Europe, for much of the 17th century, when coffee became popular as an exotic beverage, it was the drink of the rich. After a time, what once was a luxury became a staple of the masses. As a "cuppa joe" replaced the refined "dish of coffee," the more well-to-do moved on to designer brews and beverages. In the United States today, whether you buy your coffee at McDonald's or your Sumatra-grown cappuccino at Starbucks speaks volumes about how you see yourself culturally.
Have we arrived at a point in higher education where we will see increasing divergence between degrees meant for the masses and those for the elites? How will a Wal-Mart-type degree ("Always low prices") differ from high-end products with status value à la Lord & Taylor ("The Signature of American Style") and those targeted, Macy's-like, to folks in the middle ("Way to Shop!")?...