The primary purposes of the university students is to learn a profession that will help them earn their living, make a career or have a good education that will help them achieve their goals in life. So, the university students organize their daily life programs, their funds, their study in accordance with these goals. Because of this fact, the maintainers of a university or college instituion should provide the students with the proper conditions and help them with opportunities to accomplish their aims in the future. They should not have other purposes besides this one, otherwise they will not keep up with the required level in the education that they offer.
Some people may be cynical about the fact that the university education offers are mostly based on financial purposes. As an economics major I am taught in the very beginning that one of economy's primary purposes id to find the way in which the personal interest helps the social common benefit. And in most of the cases, if there are no abuses, the personal interest does help the social common benefit because the consumers' benefit helps to encourage the producers to do their best in order to maximize their profit by meeting the consumers' requirements. So, the university maintainers are encouraged to satisfy the students' needs in order to make as much profit as possible. The university maintainers are encouraged to deal much more with the students' problems. They are "forced" to have the students' goals as their primary concerns. This prevents them from being biased and having other purposes that would damage the students' performance and future profession. Because of this I agree with the William's statement that history has told that "The idea of the university" is not proggessive but reggressive, not realistic but idealistic, not serving but commanding. The universities have to provide a education that will serve the students not the providers or the goverment.
The principle of "how to use the personal interest in order to help social benefit" however has some negative side effects. Like in the USA, the universities generally tend to have a high tuition in comparison with the general economic development. Because of this only the aristocrats have an opportunity to finish a university degree and even less (maybe only the rich) have a chance to finish a master or Ph.D. degree. On the other side, this helps students to study more and deal less with useless things by teaching a lesson for life in the very beginning. Unfortunately the universities who give full or partial scholarships are relatively rare and their requirements are generally high in comparison with the normal level of high schools. The SAT test is a further obstacle because it doesn't test the performance of students at high school and there are great possibilities of "being lucky". And strangely it has a high percentage in the admission process, even higher than the high school GPA.
So as a conclusion, in order to attract the students, the university maintainers are promoted to focus on the students' interests and concerns. Although there some inconviences, the principle of" the personal interest helps the social benefit" works precisely to provide a good education for the future citizens.
Well, I do think that there are scholarship and grant programs out there to help students of a particular academic standing and financial need status to attend universities at the undergraduate level; not all university students are "aristocrats," as you say. I am certainly a beneficiary of a full package of financial aid, and if I had not been funded by different organizations to attend the university, I would not have been able to afford my college degree. I do agree, though, that access to higher education is limited, and in many ways, students who come from middle-class or upper-class families will be more likely to have the financial resources not just to afford college but also to have attended high schools in more economically stable communities where their preparation for college-level study improves (and thus their chances of admission to the university increases).
ReplyDeleteLikewise, major universities (and especially Ph.D. programs) often do provide some form of funding for graduate study--either in terms of stipends or teaching assistantships, where you get paid to teach introductory classes. The funding is usually poor, of course, but it is possible to graduate with a doctorate without any debt--rare, but not impossible. In this sense, we have to be careful about generalizing; not all students who earn Master's or doctoral degrees from well-known and -respected graduate departments necessarily came from families of means. In fact, I'd say that of my own graduate class, at least half of the students came from working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds. Just something to keep in mind!