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“How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich” by Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic

May 13, 2013 by

The study Jordan referrs to is interesting.  It can be found at http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Merit_Aid%20Final.pdf

The link to Jordan’s article is http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/how-colleges-are-selling-out-the-poor-to-court-the-rich/275725/

Here is a copy of my comment, a response to it, and my reply: (If you are a regular reader of this blog, there is not much new here, but the study (referred to above) is interesting and lists schools.)

University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins once wrote.

“…when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul…”

He went on to say that, of course, universities do need money; they just shouldn’t change their educational values to get it, or, they would lose their soul. Too many did not listen.  They lost their soul, as they took unscrupulous advantage of students and parents who could be marketed to as naive “consumers” and they used them to increase  US NEWS rankings for prestige and revenue. Now that they have sold their soul, would we expect anything other than that they would “…sell out the poor to court the rich…” as you so aptly put it.

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    Dryheaves Daily Mark Feldman•10 hours ago

    They always were businesses.. I love that made up word scholarship with regard to miney. Its a darn discount. I have never walked into a car dealership and asked for a scholarship.

    • Mark Feldman Dryheaves Daily

      I certainly agree with your comment about scholarships.

      As for being businesses, yes, they have always needed money. I don’t think that makes (or, at least, should make) them businesses, nor do I think they should be businesses, given (a) the public good that they should serve, both economically and civically; and, (b) the lack of information about that good (education) by the recipient.

      Though I disagree with your use of the word “always”, I would agree that many of them have, in the recent past, been behaving as if they were businesses – though, maybe more unsrupulously than many real businesses.

      Clark Kerr, the highly regarded Chancellor of U. of Cal. and deep thinker about education, saw clearly in 1980 where higher ed was going when he wrote “…This shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of American higher education..”

      For more about all of this, and links to other stories that show that Clark Kerr and Hutchins were right, you can go to my blog inside-higher-ed.com

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