There are all kinds of class and political issues swirling around this question that we are really not discussing (and probably shouldn’t here).
In my personal life, I, too, adhere to the education-for-its-own-sake credo. Anyone who knows me, even those of you who only know me online, knows that’s how I was raised, how I have lived, what I wanted for my kids. It’s a beautiful idea. But it has some dark edges.
The system we have was originally developed as a way to train the wealthy elite and the merely affluent bourgeoisie (mainly), along with a smattering of talented poor, for managerial and professional roles. During that magical period between the end of WWII and the mid/late 60s, when the global economy was expanding rapidly and the U.S. faced no effective global competition, access to college (and government subsidies of college) increased exponentially, but did not outstrip the baby-boom-fueled demands of the economy for managers, technicians, and professionals. At some point, however, the lines crossed, and colleges started certifying graduates as qualified for positions that no longer existed in sufficient quantity to absorb the graduates. Because that also corresponded in a radical decline in the quality of high school degrees as proof of the graduate’s basic skill set, a college degree increasingly became a prerequisite for all kinds of jobs that did not really require more than a high school education (at a high school that actually educated its students). So, on average, a college degree became less reliable as an indicator of who belonged in the managerial/professional class, but it retained its strong comparative advantage over a high school degree in terms of access to jobs and status.
Meanwhile, fueled in part – but I think not exclusively – by the governmental subsidies, colleges have vastly expanded their invested capital and their costs. College tuition charges have vastly outpaced inflation, although some of that is no doubt price discrimination (charging different people different prices for the same goods or services, based on the different customers’ different ability and willingness to pay). It would be interesting to know the extent to which real tuition, net of financial aid and scholarships, has outpaced inflation.
Educatio gratia educatis functioned extremely well from the Middle Ages forward as a strategy for nurturing and polishing elites, and helping them communicate better among themselves, in a world where most actual job training was provided or financed by the employer. It still works that way. Effectively, it is the slogan and hallmark of the elite layer of the education system which continues to apply gild and gloss to a set of students who, by dint of their wealth, connections, or sheer talent, are still going to find employers willing to pay to train them. But our system has at least a few other layers, some of which coexist in the same institutions with the elite model. One is a layer of advanced vocational training (for roles like engineers, nurses, trainers, accountants, teachers, soldiers), one is bare qualification for graduate professional training (ask MiamiDAP about this), and another is simply remedial high school, certifying that whoever completes it is competent at reading, arithmetic, basic writing, and task completion in general, and has at least half a clue about what’s going on in the larger world.
I would love to see a Marxian historian take on the development of modern higher education. There’s a narrative to be unearthed out there, in which the whole thing is a structure to off-load training costs from firms and their investors to workers, and to undermine class consciousness and collective bargaining by pseudo-professionalization of jobs.
My entire college education, at full price, cost only just about one year’s salary for the job I could have gotten upon graduation. At that price, education for its own sake is an affordable luxury. Today, though, the full cost of a bachelor’s degree can be four, five, six times the median annual salary of graduates (and much more for below-median graduates . . . plus there’s a much bigger range in what new graduates receive). There aren’t enough elite jobs available to absorb the volume of kids being qualified for them. The education-for-its-own-sake system is not sustainable beyond a thin level of elite institutions.
So of course higher education is going to be commoditized. Going to Harvard and getting a golden ticket to the Establishment Ball isn’t a commodity, but if the only function college is serving is standing between a student and medical school admission, or an accountancy board exam, much less proving that the graduate can read, write, and add, then people are going to be asking “what’s the least I have to pay for that,” and “what good is this other stuff doing me?”