Commercializing Education - A Rant
Hi everyone, today I want to rant a bit about a recent development in education and research which is only getting worse over the last decade and which got me worried.
I had to notice that education and research are being overrun by companies trying to get some easy money out of it by creating some standards only they can control which they will then make the default standard for everyone and everyone has to start paying them.
Just yesterday I was looking up the prices of language tests for my girlfriend I found out that taking the TOEFL test costs 250$ in Brazil or 246 Euros in Europe.
Similar other tests are not much better with their fees but for me this price is absurd. People should be motivated to take these tests and the cost of the test should match the cost the government has with these. But, since these tests are limited to some agencies and also controlled by these, these companies enrich themselves on the back of students which have no choice.
Normally, prices should be driven by supply and demand which automatically finds a balanced price.
But as soon as you got a company which has the only available product this balance does not exist anymore. And the company can move its price wherever they want since the customers have no choice.
Which is why Healthcare should also be regulated since you can't choose to take certain meds, either you buy and take them, or you die.
Which lead to the ridiculous pricing situation we have with this kind of exams nowadays.
Similar to that, in the last years, publication on conferences and in scientific journals got immensely important for universities to maintain their funding. While that's an obvious development, again, certain companies were able to create a monopoly on this which leads to researchers having to pay 500$+ for the event + hotel + flight and at the same time other researchers have to voluntarily review the journal and conference submissions without receiving a single cent for it.
That's what I call a win/win situation for the company, with no costs, high income.
And if someone then wants to access the pdf he has to pay 25$ for each pdf or a few hundred dollars a year.
And the author of the paper, the reviewers, the universities who produced them get nothing out of it.
Fortunately, researchers are starting to revolt against this, but my guess is that this will take a while until something changes there.
As noted [here], these companies should pay the researches who review and who submit their scientific publications for maintaining their billion dollar industry and not the other way around.
In the end, the current system delays research since excellent researches of poorer universities, countries or families aren't able to make the impact their work should have, especially because almost no one reads articles published on conferences of a low impact factor. At the same time, researchers spend money on these conferences and time reviewing which they could use to dedicate this time to research to bring our society further forward and not to enrich a handful of companies.
As said initially, this topic got me really worried also about the state of our society where neither the governments nor the big universities have the guts to speak up against these abusive billion dollar companies. Especially since any of the top 10 universities would be able to create and host a low-cost academic journal and conference which a comparable impact factor if they'd have the guts to do this.
Additionally, if you really want to read one of these scientific articles for which they charge all this money for, in most cases you can get these articles for free just by asking one of the authors politely. They don't get any of the money anyway.
I really hope this will get better over the next years because these are resources which are missing universities and are, therefore, directly paid by us taxpayers as well.
Until the next time.
Seconded, it's absolute bullshit that private companies put out tests that they can then charge for, they get to also publish books and study guides on how to do well on those tests and also charge absurd rates for those as well. At least Europe seems to be better off when it comes to actually supporting students as far as tuition for uni goes. And all publicly funded science should be open, none should be allowed to hide behind paywalls if the public funded it.
100% agree it's ridiculous if we think about it.
100% agree. Where I study they also tend to double the price of the subjects you dont pass, so the wall on university is more the money you have than your hability to study (mostly when a lot of teachers seem to think that they have to let pass the subject to a 10% of the students, no matter what). I dont think that money should be the barrier when it comes to education. You see, we need education to progress as a civilization, but if the government and private companies keep pricing it high, there are lots of people who wont have access to that education. Great post as always, @raycoms
Definitely, agree with you on that, especially because pricing things in such manner also demotivates people with less money and puts extra pressure on them.
If a company has monopoly over something it can set the prices to whatever it wants, that's the problem and that is why competition is such an important factor in our society!
Just look at the price of that drug that martin shkreli was in charge off, it rose the price from 13 to 750 bucks over night!
Yeah, and that's what we have governments for and that's why we pay taxes, so the government protects us against this. Institutions like the European Union could easily create their own standards for reasonable prices as could the top universities create a way to fight this, they're just not interested.
Don't know about ur government, but mine just want to get a piece of the taxes in their own pockets and that is it... greed and corruption has spreed throughout my gov, the only way to solve this is for people to get an education and start learning stuff from places not controlled by the government, unfortunately, like you said, the prices to get a good education are starting to become higher and higher...
And since you mentioned brazil im guessing you are from brazil right? If you are then you probably have the same greed and corruption growing throughout your government since you brazilians are very similar to us portuguese in more then the language...
I'd even say it's way worse in Brazil than it is in Portugal =D
But yeah, I see a solution in Organizations like the European Union which could solve local corruption by intervening but people don't pay a lot of attention voting for the EU parliament and only vote idiots there as well =D
All of Portugal's EU's parliaments deputies or whatever they are called voted for article 13 (the one against memes and such)... even though a large part of Portugal's citizens sent emails and letters asking them to change their mind and that they were going against portugal's best interests!
WE have a bunch of old timers dictating our future!
And yes Brazil is much worse than Portugal when it comes to corruption, greed, etc... I think the only reason Portugal isn't worse is because we are in the EU!
The problem is that on the next elections everyone is going to vote the same people again =D (In portugal as in Brazil)
So true... it's like people have no brain to think and go with the mass opinion!
I always try to vote for guys that have almost no power and look like they could do shit! Last time i voted i voted for PAN, (partido dos animais e da natureza), they finally got 1 guy on the inside and so they are trying to stop bullfighting( an outdated barbarian and cruel thing that outdated people thinks it's tradition) and they've done many new laws and such for animals rights!
1 guy was able to do more than the rest of the scum that is in there!