College Is a Business. Students Are the Product.
Let’s drop the narrative for a second. In today’s America, universities are not temples of learning. They are not shrines for intellectual thought. They are now businesses, full stop. They are corporations with furry animal mascots. Bureaucracies with cramped dormitories. A consortium of ball games and corporate donors.
Us students these institutions claim to serve? We are not “the future.” We are not “tomorrow’s leaders.” We are the product. The revenue stream. We’re the gears that keep the multi-billion-dollar circuses grinding on.
For decades, we have been told that the problem with higher education is so-called “liberal bias.” It’s pure theatrics and distraction. The real bias, and the only one that matters, is toward administrative profit. Toward squeezing the finances out of 18-year-olds before we can even buy property. Toward building glamorous sports complexes while classrooms crumble. Toward hiring administrators and provosts for niche specialties, while adjunct professors lack health insurance and job security. So please, give me a break when you say the “politics” of a liberal arts professor is the end of the world.
Let’s state the obvious: universities in America run on neoliberal management models. Everything is branded and monetized. Students are the customers, professors are the content providers, and the administrators are the CEOs of the absurd operation. The goal isn’t scholarship; the goal is scalability. There’s less focus on enlightenment, more so on enrollment. Not for curiosity, just for cash.
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The most sacred golden calf is athletics. It’s not academics, research, or the well-being of students. It’s football.
Picture this in your head: A philosophy department begs for more paper. A dorm’s maintenance is failing as mold creeps through the walls. A dining hall is desperately seeking more workers as dishes pile up. But when the football coach wants to add a barbershop to the futuristic, annually renovated locker room? Instantly approved. The regents run ultramarathons to dump millions into the project. Why? Because athletics bring donors. Donors bring money. And money is the only language the modern university structure understands.
Students are increasingly drowning in debt, so companies can show off their logos on the field. Yes, the NCAA made this possible, and it’s led to an increase in the bloating of athletic departments across American universities. Universities claim this is for school pride, as our tuition money is continuously funneled into losing seasons.
Students are led to believe that this is healthy and necessary. We need to be grateful that we’re exploited and spat into a job market that wants three years of experience for the most basic entry-level positions.
The truth is simple, so simple it only sounds radical due to years of gaslighting by culture warriors and the educational establishment: Universities should be places of learning. Students are human beings. Education should be a public good.
But until we stop pretending that tuition hikes are caused by “inflation” or “DEI programs” or “gender studies” or “wokeism,” and start pointing this anger toward the real culprit: administrative bloat, donor boot licking, the athletic industrial complex, and the cult of the market-driven educational model, nothing will ever change.
If college is going to keep acting like a business, it’s time students start acting like something other than the product.
