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Let’s Make Education Big Business

I would like to draw your attention today to this article: Let’s Make Education Big Business, With Profit, Loss and High Pay for Top Performers.  I would like for a good education model to be in place that works.  But I am not sure if the business model would even work for education.   

You see business has a knack for coming in taking over, and driving the price up.  Look at for profit Colleges and Universities.  Carrie Lukas is correct; you pay outlandishly for an education that is not even worth more than two years.  But students are paying for four and six years of school, and they really have nothing to show for it after the second year.  The ones really profiting are the lenders, and shareholders.  They get paid regardless if a student learns anything or not.

 Lending is big business.  Just promise the student that they will earn $70,000.00 or more after they graduate, and students will sign any paper you put in front of them.   They see dollar signs.  Well, at least that was how it worked until students caught on that the economy was crap,  lenders were lying to them, and many horror stories were showing up online, and on TV about how the jobs were gone, but the lenders will still pushing their money.  Now students are getting smart.

 So let’s ask the most important questions before anyone comes up with some bright idea to turn business loose on our school system.  “How will you keep business from driving the price up?”  And “How will you keep business from taking over the school system?”  This is what happened to Colleges, and Universities.

 Wouldn’t it make more sense for business to complement the school system instead of being top dog?  I don’t want us to dive into this without giving these two questions some thought.  If business worked as great as everyone claimed for profit Colleges and Universities today would be outstanding places to learn a career.  The United States would be number one in the world for all of its upper education. It’s not.  So let’s not dig into making our k-12 education system for profit too quickly.  Put some thought into it, or k-12 will end up like this and this and our k-12 schools will be even more of a total mess, and students still won’t have anything to show for those twelve years.  If you insist on making big business part of our education system then please allow business to complement the school system, but never have control over it.

Business could bid for placement in school career workshops.  They could come in discuss teach and ted talk students on their expertise.  But when you give them full reigns to do as they please, and dictate the school curriculum, then you have a problem.  Areas needing to be covered are ignored, students education ends up evolving around just one or two businesses instead of being diverse. Education becomes one sided.  Students are no longer getting a robust well rounded education.