Economics 101: Higher Education

It was rush hour on campus. Foot traffic flowed along Pollock Road in both directions, bound for 2:30 classes. I was marveling, as I often do, at how many of the students were listening to music, talking on cell phones, wearing hoodies and filling the breathing and thinking spaces in their conversations with the word “like.” One voice rang out among the others.

“I hate professors!” the speaker said, with considerable vehemence. (“I, like, hate professors” would have been much less forceful.)

In keeping with the university’s “Zero Tolerance for Hate” policies, I immediately reported her to the proper authorities.

I did no such thing, of course. For one thing, the speaker wasn’t one of my students and wasn’t addressing me, so I couldn’t take her outburst personally. For another, I considered it quite likely she didn’t mean anything other than that she was feeling overwhelmed with work.

Still, I was struck, as I often am, by how odd it is for people who are spending tens of thousands of dollars for a service to complain about it, not because they’re not getting their money’s worth, but because they are. (No one demands a refund when we cancel class.)

Perhaps they are confused about the nature of the transaction to which they are a party. (Did somebody say party?)

Most of our economic relationships follow either the employee/employer model or the consumer/provider model: If you’re the employee and I am the employer, then you give me work and I give you money. If you’re the consumer and I’m the provider, then I provide goods or services to you and you give me money.

Here’s how the student/university relationship works: If you’re the student and I’m the university, then you give me money AND you give me work.

At least, that’s how the students see it, I think. And they don’t think it’s fair. What makes sense to them is this arrangement: They give us money and we give them bachelor’s degrees. (That would leave plenty of time for partying.)

Oh, I suppose I’m the one who’s being unfair here. Students know they have to study to get that bachelor’s degree. On some level, they may even get that they are paying for instruction, not sheepskin. That’s why we call it tuition.

The awarding of the degree is a separate transaction that actually doesn’t involve money. It works like this: You prove to your instructors’ collective satisfaction that you have learned something, we fork over the diploma.

Maybe the problem is that students view enrolling in a university the same way they view joining a gym: They know they have to work to achieve their goal, but they think they should be the ones deciding how often to go and how hard to work. When we, the faculty, demand that they show up and work harder than they’ve a mind to, we become hateful — even though we’re doing exactly what they’re paying us to do.

One unfortunate result of viewing higher education as an economic transaction is that it causes everyone involved to equate grades with money. Makes sense, right? If you work, you should get paid. We pay them in grades.

School thus becomes like a boring job: You do it not for the satisfaction of the work, but for the paycheck. Take an eavesdropping stroll around campus during peak hours and you’ll hear many more conversations about grades and the hateful profs who assign them than about the scintillating content of the courses.

In the days before courses had their own Web sites I had a colleague who posted weekly point total updates on his office door so his students always knew exactly how they were doing in his class. I was new to the teaching business at the time so my first thought was, yipes, maybe I should be doing that.

But then I decided I did not want to ratify the obsession with grades. Yes, they need to demonstrate that they’re getting whatever I want them to get out of the class, but this should not be the focus. In fact, rather than wrack my brains deciding if a piece of writing is worth a B+ or an A-, I’d like to move to a radically simplified grading system: Work is either outstanding, adequate or inadequate.

While I was writing this column a student came by to chat about her grades. She’s probably working on a B in the class and was hoping she could still bring it up to an A.

I told her, yes, there was still time, but here’s a little secret about employers: Most of them don’t care a feather or a fig about your grade-point average.

In the newspaper business, for example, editors want to know three things about you: Can you write? Are you reliable? Do you work well with others?

The C you may have pulled in chemistry during your freshman year doesn’t help them answer any of those questions. For that matter, neither does that A you got in my journalism class.

If you want to assign this column a grade, contact Russell Frank at rbf5@psu.edu.