Illustration by Cody Angell

"You get what you pay for."

I hear these words often now - in discussions about brain drain, about tuition hikes, about anything relating to this university.

And I wonder: Is this any way to view higher education? Has a college education become (or was it always) a commodity to be bought and sold? Is "student" just another word for "consumer?"

Certainly, we see sentiments of this around campus. The above statement, for example, implies that as tuition increases, so too does the level of quality education. Complaints about a faceless university that packs students into lecture halls and dorm rooms filled beyond capacity, gouges them for parking spaces and forces them to take pre-packaged, happy-meal general education courses, all speak to a notion that the student is no more than a buyer on the college-campus market.

All University of Arizona cares about is our money, the prevailing ideology goes.

I have no intention of demonizing the university - it has to compete for students against much more Microsoft-esque universities across the country. Nor am I writing a lament about the commodification of higher education, because I recognize that certain benefits come with the detriments. More accurately, I simply want to acknowledge that America's view on higher education has changed.

The university is a consumer economy, where (if I may be allowed one lament) education often suffers.

I offer two examples. First, a few years back, a "concerned" parent complained to the university after her daughter was required to read a lesbian-themed piece of literature. There was much outcry about "objectionable" material, and the controversy even went so far as to suggest that warning labels be put on syllabi about such material.

Of course, who would get to decide what was "objectionable" and what would be counted under that rubric was little mentioned. Certainly, gay and lesbian subject matter would fall victim, and that is simply yet another example of homophobia at large.

But, for this column, I'm more interested in the justification the defenders of these warning labels used: The course was something that the student was paying for, and therefore, there must be full disclosure about course material. You get what you pay for, and apparently learning something outside one's narrow worldview constitutes consumer fraud.

The commodification of higher education, though, is a double-edged sword. Yes, the university see students as bundles of tuition dollars in black platform flip-flops, but in the market, buying power is power indeed - the power to dictate what kind of education a student will receive, professor be damned.

My second example speaks to this point. As the semester ends, we all have to fill out course evaluations. Yet these evaluations in no way evaluate the amount of the student's commitment or effort throughout the semester, giving professors and administrators no way of buffering potentially very negative comments against a student's performance.

The student has a good deal of leverage in this situation.

On one hand, this is good - the evaluations are designed to allow students to openly express their opinions without fear of retribution from the professor.

On the other hand, though, it is emblematic of a university - of all universities that consider the student to be a consumer, purchasing the commodity of higher education. In a free market, a seller has to meet consumer demand, and the evals are our demands.

Because it is not as if the professors themselves are free from the machine of capitalism. Publish or perish. If students don't take your class, then we'll refuse to offer it. In some way, they are at the whim of students. In a few years, the schedule of classes will look more and more like a mail-order catalogue, where students can send away for their degrees (complete with the free-gift-with-purchase Nike tote bag).

So when I take my degrees to New York City in May, I'm not going to consider whether I got what I paid for over my four years at UA. Rather, I'm going to ask what makes me even ask that question in the first place.