The University is not a business
Treating the University as a business has damaged the quality of education and undermined its requests for funding.
By Eric Murphy - May 03, 2012
For some reason, it is currently in vogue to treat all institutions like businesses. A college education is increasingly viewed as a personal investment one makes in the hopes of being rewarded financially. Public officials, colleges, parents and even students are becoming obsessed with job placement statistics. Former University of Minnesota President Bob Bruininks was named CEO of the year by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal in 2009. Even our top education official in the country, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is fond of saying we need to “educate our way to a better economy.”
This is a corruption of what public education is about. In the wake of an economic crisis, it is natural for economic issues to become all-encompassing, but we can’t lose sight of the real value of education. The University’s missions are research and discovery, teaching and learning, and outreach and public service, not training undergraduates for a job. We have other institutions like community colleges and work training centers, or even employers themselves, to fill those roles. We should not be educating our way to a better economy, we should be educating our way to a better democracy.
The purpose of a higher education at the University is not to create competent workers; it is to facilitate the creation of fully realized human beings and to spread knowledge. The economic side effects of doing so are clear but incidental. The real value of higher education is to create competent human beings and citizens.
This is why the University advocates such a broad education. If you have no understanding of our political system, those who do can use it to take advantage of you. If you don’t understand journalism or communication, those who do can use the media and advertising to manipulate and mislead you. If you don’t understand the science behind disease and medicine, or pollution and climate change, drug companies and polluters can damage your environment and your body without you knowing it. Knowledge is power, and without broad education, that power coalesces into the hands of a few. Education, especially public higher education, democratizes knowledge and the power that comes with it so that our society can make better decisions in the interest of all rather than being helpless while the powerful manipulate us. It is something society provides because doing so is in its own best interest.
But the view of education as a product and the University as a business which sells that product to its customers — students — has eroded this function of public higher education and introduced the worst aspects of the private sector into the University. Its view that it needs to compete with the private market for administrators has led to unnecessarily bloated salaries for top executives while at the same time most other employees are squeezed in the name of “efficiency.”
Since the University views itself as a business selling a product to customers and makes its funding argument to legislators on economic terms, those legislators are free to view the University as a discretionary investment or interest group and feel no special need to provide funding, which is why we have seen state funding drop precipitously in recent years. The way the University is currently making its case for funding from the state makes them no different than the Vikings. We essentially argue that we benefit the economy and are a smart financial investment for the state. But big business-style administrative bloat and rising tuition and student debt make that a less and less compelling case every year.
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| In 2050, perhaps 2070, this will be a useful, employable skill set. Our duty to business and students, as educators, is to teach it now. We must define and capture the leading edge of employability learning. photo credit |
UPDATE: Further reading for anyone interested in education as a process and situation in times that are in flux [history teaching us that times always are in flux with some aspects of culture being universal and eternal]. Time marches on. All that.