Sunday, February 22, 2015

Is Higher Education a Business?

President's Day Weekend is a time of year that many high school students visit colleges, touring the campuses to help them make a decision on where to go. This year I joined the group, traveling from one college to another in North Carolina. I saw 3 very different Colleges: University of North Carolina, Duke, and Elon. The first is a large state school with 18,000 undergraduates, the second is a medium sized private university with around 7,000 undergraduates, the third is a small private college with about 5,000 undergraduates.

Each school was in a different town, with a different kind of student attending them; what was remarkable was the how much each tour mimicked the other two. It seemed that each school boasted all the same traits. Each tour mentioned how many clubs it had, and the fact that students could start their own clubs based on their own unique interest. Each tour mentioned one card that could be spent on stores and restaurants around campus as well as used for laundry. Each tour mentioned their many different options on how to find the perfect roommate.

These similarities made the schools seem like competing companies rather than educational institutions. The mention of the same features sounded much like Samsung and Apple comparing cell phones, or like McDonald's and Burger King trying to make theirs the fast food chain of choice. Rather than try to present the school in a way that showed what student life would be like the schools seemed to just be checking off boxes that matched them to the competition. When one school builds a new fitness center, the rest build a fitness center and a new dining hall. The escalation takes the education that a student is getting secondary and the facilities and programs outside of studies the primary concern. These tours don't focus on academia, instead they try and compete for student attention; the schools try to one up each other rather than really show a student what it is like to attend the University.

What is the point of touring if all the schools say the same thing? Schools aren't corporations, so they shouldn't act like them.