Higher education: From craft-production to capitalist enterprise?

First Monday

Volumn 3, Issue 9, 1998, Pages

  Taylor, Kit Sims ^a  

^a Bellevue Community College   (United States)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 54649084727     PISSN: 13960466     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5210/fm.v3i9.618     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Published in Monthly Review (February 1998)
2. and in First Monday volume 3, number 1 (January 1998).
3. Michael Margolis provides a scenario by which higher education becomes a commodity in "Brave New Universities" (First Monday, volume 3, number 5 (May 1998)).
4. For the purposes of this paper, I am subsuming professionals in general - and college professors in particular - under the category of crafts persons.
5. Capital, Volume I, Part IV, Chapter XV, "Machinery and Modern Industry."
6. Joseph A. Schumpeter, 1975. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Third edition. New York: Harper & Row, p. 67.
7. Kevin Kelly, 1997. "New Rules for the New Economy," Wired, volume 5, number 9 (September).
8. The Marx/Engels Archive is a valuable source as well as a good example of how a Web-based resource can be organized. The McMaster University Archive of the History of Economic Thought which provides electronic access to the full texts of most of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century classics of political economy.
9. In the Puget Sound region of Washington state at present, community colleges are able to hire part-time instructors at about $2,000 to $2,400 for a five credit-hour course for one quarter. A part-time instructor teaching the equivalent of a full-time load - by teaching at several colleges at the same time - earns $20,000 per year or less. Some private institutions in the region pay even less: $1,000 to $1,500 for a five credit-hour course.
10. This has not happened yet. But as more firms enter the business of computer-mediated higher education we can expect to see some price competition, particularly among firms that market their courses primarily to companies that are willing to pay their employees' tuition.'