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3 What Is a Student to Think? _ s tudents seeking a self-made college experience find themselves navigating between implied market coercion—higher ed as obligation—and sustained cultural criticism, which says education is hopelessly compromised , not worth the cost, and a waste of time. yet beyond the pincer grasp of economic instrumentality and wholesale devaluation, there remain many reasons to go to college and many aspirations to be realized by it. While long touted as an engine of opportunity, higher education is both highly stratified and stratifying. enrolling older students and those who would not have attended college, propriety schools now enjoy huge growth, as state schools and community colleges had during the sixties boom. selectivity—the push to reduce the ratio of accepted students to applicants—has launched a national contest by which more students apply for more schools and small movements on the list of rankings are counted as major victories. almost all high school completers plan on college. More than three-quarters enroll. still, the median age of college students is on the rise, and, as Chapter 1 indicates, the hundred million students in adult education eclipse by far the roughly eighteen million matriculated students. Given the volatility of careers and employment, university extension and lifelong learning chase the shift from upward to lateral mobility , as even professional workers need to return to the classroom for retooling. For many, the credential of an undergraduate degree loses its longevity. When higher education was restricted to the elite, the liberal arts promise of education as an end in itself could set the university apart from the world to which its graduates were practically guaranteed entry. an education in the classics could endure an eternity and signal a stature and enduring value that the 52 • ChapteR 3 hurly-burly of the marketplace would find hard pressed to bequeath. in practice , there were many strands of impatience with liberal learning, and business was from the start entangled with the elaboration of the modern university. yet now, even liberal learning has adopted the professional model, delivering measurable worldliness and agreed-upon content and skills, along with the capacity to intervene. While liberal arts degrees have declined as a proportion of the total and professional degrees have held sway, students have had to think about college as a way of locating themselves in the world. during the four decades following World War ii, when colleges and students were more substantially supported by federal and state funding, higher education looked to be a public good along the lines of preparation for healthy citizenship . Most famously, with the Gi Bill and subsequently with aid such as pell Grants (need-based grants for low-income undergraduates), college was linked to national service and civic entitlement as part of the claims to a free society. even as these programs limited access to education, they could be the objects of correction through subsequent ameliorative legislation, like affirmative action. the dismantling of the social compact that supported universal access combined constructs of scarcity and fiscal crisis (as in the case of open admissions ), with moral imperatives that only markets deliver authentic goods. defunding was driven by the notion that public monies merit no place where personal preference can reign. When education is recast as a private good, the higher calling of a debt to society drifts toward more prosaic versions of debt. tax-deferred annuities have replaced grants and entitlements as the preferred mechanisms for public policy to advance college access. admissions offices can resemble brokerage houses that retail bankers’ wares. admissions offices can also face potential conflicts of interest they never had to navigate before. the precollege experience of managing credit is converted into the blunt instrument of living with debt. as a private good, colleges must look to the quality of the services they provide, whether their facilities are state of the art, or at how effectively their staff engender an appropriate affective bond to the college community. the full-service model of education attaches most strongly to the selective residential college, where the aim is to create brand loyalty that repays over a lifetime. the investment in the student promises long-range return. the transactions for distance learning and other proprietaries exist in the here and now. it would be tempting to sketch a caricature of the contemporary college student as conservative, narrowly focused, fully instrumentalized, disinterested in the social environs, and disinclined to participate in public affairs. While easy to draw, such cartoons...

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