Write a article students and consumerism
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With increasing stridence, college students and their parents frame their educational expectations with a consumer paradigm, viewing professors as their employees, universities as consumer markets, and degrees as commodities. As a humanities professor, I have always bristled at this equation. However, I see a way to use this metaphor for good purpose. Rather than fight this flawed mentality, I present the consumer model during one of our first class sessions and engage students in an exploration of its applicability to the educational enterprise.
First, I endorse the maxim that “you get what you pay for.” Second, I encourage students to conceive of the course (at least temporarily) as a transaction and our student-professor relationship as a business relationship. As a professor of creative writing, literature, and composition, I never thought I would write that sentence. However, embracing the consumer paradigm that has made educators grind their teeth is a way to test students’ assumptions about the purpose and value of a college education, the responsibilities of both the student, the professor, and the institution, and the standards by which consumers should assess the worth of a product. In form, this discussion might resemble the negotiation of a contract between two parties who want to define the terms of a purchase or an exchange of goods or services. Though I have the key components in mind before the class begins, I engage the students in constructing the language and defining terms and conditions of this contract.
In the part of this discussion, which may consume one or more class sessions, I ask students to define the content or skills suggested by the course description that have a clear market value, encouraging them to think in terms of specific companies, types of work, or industries that they hope to enter. For example, I ask, “Based on my descriptions of this course’s content and objectives, what specific skill or knowledge can you acquire that could have a real and practical value mediocre intellectual exertion, predictability.