College applicants are both the customer and commodity
The recent documentary Social Dilemma made a damning claim about today’s social media landscape. Users are both the customer and the commodity. The same applies for college admissions and higher education, if in different ways.
College students are both the customer and the commodity. They pay not just for academics, skills, and social networks but also the quintessential “American college experience.” Even during the pandemic, students shelled out tens of thousands of tuition dollars for Zoom University classes lest they be left behind in our meritocratic rat race. Alternatives such as online learning or trade schools may help some consumers, especially from non-college-going communities. Online learning is highly unlikely to displace entrenched brick-and-mortar universities whose appeal endures despite the pandemic. Ambitious high school students have little choice but to apply to and be consumers of elite universities’ services.
Although the wealthiest students attending the best schools have overwhelming advantages compared to the low-income students they often tutor to bolster their college resume, they buckle under the extreme pressures expected of them. Lack of sleep has become a virtue, “busyness” the default mode of living, panic attacks an unwelcome occurrence disrupting their rigid schedules. Adulthood seeps deeper into adolescence. Their teenage dreams and ambitions are commoditized into a late-stage capitalist system that requires them to go into debt to make a living wage.
Paradoxically, digital-native teens, deprived of unstructured time and glued to their devices, are less prepared than ever to enter an increasingly complex adult world. Nevertheless, the competition within the top 1 percent and America’s best high schools is intense, and admission spaces zero-sum. One can get ahead only by dominating those below. Poor students don’t have a spot at the admissions dinner table, whereas rich kids take most of the seats and politely fight over the food. Middle-class students scramble for the crumbs.
Elite universities are composed mainly of the winners from the cutthroat admissions competition. Higher education economics demands that an ever-increasing supply of full-tuition-paying students receive their degrees to make space for the next cohort. Because wealth concentrates in fewer numbers of families than in previous generations, affluent students are highly sought-after commodities. They subsidize need-based financial aid for the few low-income students on elite college campuses.
A shrinking middle class pressures universities to recruit and graduate a dwindling supply of full-tuition students. Recruiting wealthy students who are mostly white or Asian comes into conflict with many institutions’ commitment to increasing education access for first-generation and low-income students who are often, but not always, black, Hispanic, or Native American. Universities love to promote their diversity numbers, who are the most sought after commodities in the college recruitment battle.
Most universities are less interested in student health than getting you in and out as quickly as possible. Increasing education delivery efficiency is essential to maintain freshman retention and four-year graduation rates. It’s more convenient and less of a hassle to push students through with easy A’s than to enforce rigor. Federal aid such as Pell Grants depends on universities maintaining a certain graduation rate threshold. Their budgets depend on granting you a degree, creating pressures to diminish curricula quality for myriad reasons. A higher percentage of Pell-eligible student enrollment boosts a university’s ranking, further entangling the web of incentives that drives the admissions madness.
Excellence matters more than well-being, reflected in mental health crises and binge drinking cultures affecting virtually all elite college campuses. Campuses confront pressures to meet their own medical school placement metrics, research grants acquired, and their graduates receiving prestigious fellowships such as Fulbright and Rhodes Scholars. Excellent students become advertisement fodder in recruitment brochures targeting prospective students. Universities commoditize student experiences, and thus the recruitment-to-graduation pipeline continues indefinitely.
UT-Austin published and promoted my undergraduate achievements to attract future students in various articles and outlets, sometimes without my consent. One headline regarding my research abroad read, “Some students go to Cancun. This Liberal Arts undergraduate went to Bosnia and Rwanda.” Idiotic in its own right and ironic because I read the article while I was literally in the Yucatan near Cancun, pursuing an English teaching certificate. My varied scholarships and accolades received at UT-Austin came at the subtle cost of becoming a commodity in UT’s recruitment and branding.
