Yesterday, a friend updated her Facebook status expressing displeasure with Gov. Pawlenty’s referring to college students as consumers. All of the respondents seemed to share her displeasure, so I decided to keep my contrarian mouth shut over there.

Over here, though , I can be as contrary as I wanna be. And I want to be contrary a lot.[1]

Before the contrariness, though, a bit of rhetorical house-cleaning: Even though it’s not strictly accurate, I am using “consumer” as a synonym for “customer”. I realize that in some circles “consumer” still carries implications about the person being described and the system in which sie is situated, but I think more vernacularly the word has come to mean “someone who buys something”. It does not imply that the thing being bought has been commodified, it just means that an economic transaction has taken place in which the person exchanges money (or equivalent) for goods or services.

An aside about the commodification of education: in the Marxist sense, that would be impossible because education has always been understood as an economic transaction. Always, forever, since the beginning of economic transactions. Aristotle didn’t tutor young Alexander for funsies, you know. In the currently mainstream sense of commodities, the fact that education suppliers are very strongly differentiated suggests that there’s little chance of higher ed being commodified in the foreseeable future. So let’s just put those notions to the side.

One more thing at the outset: I have no sympathy for the notion some students have that their tuition pays for certain grades, that they’re paying good money and so deserve to get an A or at least pass. That’s just silly, and it’s one of the most common early objections I’ve seen when professors start complaining against the conception of students as consumers. It’s not a necessary consequence of such a conception, though; a person hiring a personal trainer is a consumer of the gym’s services, but just writing the checks isn’t going to flatten hir stomach or buff hir biceps. While we do have to keep an eye on this as conception passes into execution, I think we can put this to the side as well.

So, what’s so bad about considering students as consumers, as long as we make sure they know it’s a Gold’s Gym model and not a McDonald’s model? I hesitate to speculate, because I’m afraid I can’t do so charitably. My kindest supposition is that it forces academics to acknowledge that they are operating within a very expensive economic enterprise–as they have always done, forever and ever–and are not gentlepersonly scholars left free to pursue and develop their intellectual passions. Shorter, they have to look at their job as if it’s a job and not a sinecure awarded for being clever.

Like I said, that’s the most charitable I can be on this issue. My biases are evident here; rest assured they will be tempered later, if this thing grows as long as I suspect it will.

What is gained by thinking of education as a service to be purchased and not an endeavor to be entered into (at a ghastly fee)? Accountability. I didn’t run into this problem at the smaller schools I attended, but apparently it’s fairly common at, y’know, good schools for people to spend their first couple of years being taught largely by people who’s only credential is their enrollment in a program that may eventually qualify them as teachers. To pay lots of money to be taught by someone who is, in reality, just a slightly more advanced student is criminal.

More broadly, if education is construed as a service, then the focus should shift toward an institutional emphasis on teaching. No matter how brilliant a mathematician might be, sie has no place in a classroom is sie can’t communicate clearly with hir students and, more importantly, help them learn the concepts that the class is supposed to teach. If the heavy lifting can be done by textbooks and supplementary materials, then there’s no reason for the classroom (and tuition) to exist.

More abstractly, when education is a service and students are consumers, the academy gains a (theoretical) responsibility to acknowledge students’ purposes in purchasing that service. The outcomes of a given degree should be clearly defined, as concretely as possible, and–if students assume that the degree is some sort of preparation for something–the likely possibilities the degree opens up should be presented.

And here’s where I reveal that I’m not quite as unsympathetic to the academy as I might seem: The major problem is that there has, for at least a century, been a significant gap between students’ and academics’ conception of the nature of the academy. To grossly oversimplify, academics think of the university as a site primarily concerned with research and secondarily with the creation of new researchers; students think of the university as a place that helps them become better-educated people and allows them to get good jobs (self-reported poll data suggests that students’ primary and secondary emphases have changed over time[2]).

The problem looks pretty fucking huge at first glance, but if you look deeper it gets even worse. From reading comments on the recent spate of “what are the humanities good for?” articles, it seems to me that persons who are college graduates but are non-academics see “better educated” as meaning “exposed to lots of different ideas and art and stuff”, while academics see “better educated” as meaning “have adopted a scholarly mindset toward different ideas and art and stuff”. It’s the difference between appreciation and analysis, but both sides of the divide are using the same language to describe very different approaches. Neither side seems to realize (or at least acknowledge) that, though, so things very quickly get very messy.

Of course, the more obvious way in which the problem is huge has enough bad consequences. The people who are paying for an education[3] think they’re paying for one thing, while the people who are providing the education think they’re engaged in a different enterprise entirely. This can not end well for anyone involved, as Cake Wrecks so often demonstrates.

(An aside that I find fascinating: According to a history of standardized testing I read a while back, the people who worked hard to make college educations available to everyone in the middle of last century really, truly did believe that they were ushering in an age of widespread scholarship–”scholarship” as academics understand it, not in the “intellectual curiosity” sense that most of us use. They were quite dismayed when they found that engineering and other professional degrees were more popular, and that even the people who studied softer subjects mostly ended up pursuing careers rather than devoting themselves primarily to intellectual pursuits.[4])

Wrapping up, sort of: By construing students as consumers and higher education as a costly service rather than, I dunno, a medieval apprenticeship system, we just might be able to align the goals of the public with the goals of some institutions while clarifying the fact that other institutions are not offering what their students think they’re buying. There would be a lot of shake-out, I’m afraid, and it probably wouldn’t be pretty for anyone for a generation or so. But it would help a lot of young people avoid making very costly mistakes, and it would (eventually) clarify assumptions about what a uni degree means and whether it’s necessary. I’m pretty sure it would be bad news for a lot of people whose ambition is to be humanities or social-science scholars, but them’s the breaks.

[1] Actually, that’s pretty much the opposite of true, mountains of seeming evidence notwithstanding.

[2] I can’t help but wonder, though: If on the day the most idealistic student is registering for freshman classes a Genuine Prophet walks up, grabs hir hand, and says “You will work as an office temp for the rest of your life,” would that student still take on $20,000 in debt to spend a few years studying poetry?

[3] Which is most emphatically *not* the same thing as footing the bill for the university. Lots and lots of tons of money come in through research grants and, if you’re one of the big boys, licensing.

[4] This, too, is an oversimplification. To briefly describe what the people behind the mass-education movement really, truly, genuinely thought would happen would make them sound like utter dolts, and they weren’t. Let’s just say they chased their philosopher-king hangover from too much The Republic with an unhealthy dose of Horatio Alger and move on.