And that is a major part of the problem. Full stop. Much like health care and housing, if you treat education like a business, you’re going to get issues like this cropping up, because the value is no longer intrinsic to itself, it has to justify itself as a business, so out goes all the things that make getting an education worth while - focusing on deep learning, on deeper understanding, on exploring ideas or concepts that might be foreign to you, on understanding in a more meaningful way how science works, or how a poem or a story work. Out goes all the things that don’t “make you money.” And that takes all of the joy out of education, it dehumanizes the people doing the educating, and it makes people who are getting an education frustrated and resentful.
At the heart of all these problems lies the corporatization of the academy. Not that it was some utopia before, but while that has helped to expand access to a higher education, it has also cheapened it to a mere commodity, instead of a means of both giving yourself a better quality of life and greater options within the job market.
