Marketization Of Education An Ethical Dilemma Analysis

In the article, “Marketization of Education: An Ethical Dilemma” by Samuel M. Natale and Caroline Doran, Natale and Doran focus on how the priorities of higher education institutions have changed. The authors explain how the shift in these priorities affect the university, faculty, students, learning, as well as possible solutions to these problems. Natale and Doran start off by explaining how the priorities of the universities have shifted from giving students a meaningful education to making higher education more like businesses and how it affect universities and faculty. Natale and Doran begin with the conflict of how college institutes are trying to become more competitive and make a name for themselves without changing any of these standards and qualify of learning. College institutions do this by turning students into consumers and making their main concern to find out which program will bring in the most revenue and is the most cost-efficient. This cause the faculty to be more occupied in “financially productive research” (Natale and Doran 146) rather than giving the students a …show more content…
The first dilemma is ranking. Students use the ranking of a school to decide which college institution they will attend and college spends large sums of money in order to improve their ranking. Natale and Dornan provide a solution to the ranking issue, that if schools no longer cooperate with organizations that does rankings than they are free of the restraints of ranking. The second issue is branding. The problem with branding is that the college institution 's branding efforts can be “misleading and unethical” (155). Natale and Doran suggest that the institutions transform their “enrollment management offices into counseling services” (155) in order to have more students become participants in learning instead of consumers of