College's and University's are no longer interested in educating it's students, they are now more worried about enrollment numbers and tuition rates. This creates a devaluation of a degree. Administrator's, who are making six figure salaries, would allow a student to get a bachelor's without any real academic rigor, rather than flunking a student out of school. With the exception of a very few professors I had throughout my time in undergrad, I coasted through with everyone else. Many of the student's were babied and coddled, by professor's, never really challenging students to do their best.
However, while I worked hard to achieve what I did, there were a number of students who got through without opening a text book, living from bong hit to bong hit, and partied like there was no tomorrow. Granted, they did not go on to grad school, nor had the GPA I had, but they still received the same degree as myself. Many will go into the work force drastically unprepared to apply what they learned. While I know many will go into completely different fields then their degree, the primary purpose of college has become to learn how to learn. This seems almost backwards, and almost seems as if going to college is just a waste of time and money. Shouldn't we be "learning how to learn" in K-12? Instead K-12 is teaching kids how to take tests, as standardized tests have become the benchmark of learning, which is ridiculous.
But as usual, I digress... The shift to a business model of education, where all the institution cares about is income, does a number of things. First, it makes education less accessible for those without money. If tuition keeps rising, smaller amounts of people will be able to afford to attend college, thus maintaining the current white hegemonic masculinity which guides our nation. Second, it puts more pressure on faculty to create streams of income for the college/university thus distracting them from what should be their primary goal, which is the education of the students. Therefore, teachers lose the ability and/or capacity to teach. Third, it creates a biased system in which knowledge is auctioned off to the highest bidder. For example, private interests and corporations funding the focused research of whatever they wish. If they don't see the results, then they can pay enough to manufacture them, thus making academia irrelevant. This third point is also seen through the funding of higher education by the military industrial complex, which in turn perpetuates violence for its own control and financial gains.
While I am choosing to enter academia as a profession, I hope that someday this corporate model of education will cease to exist. If we can get back to the basics of teaching, which allows for academic freedom perhaps we can actually make the world a better place. Not to say that academics are not trying to do so already, but this would make it much easier, as the ideas that academics profess could actually become infectious, and practice could be transformed into reality, because students would be actually learning rather than skimming by to get a piece of paper.
