I mention this not because I actually want to weigh in on the issue of online teaching and how universities are preparing for the Fall 2020 semester. I've been involved in planning at Mount A and it is difficult (and, oddly and interestingly rewarding but that is another story). Instead, I mention this because I want to talk about the question of value. I don't inherently disagree with the UNB student leaders. I'd need to think through their position in considerably more detail before I had an opinion on it. Instead, what I'd like to do is talk about who we assess value and how that is translated into dollar terms because that is, after all, what the student leaders were discussing. I want to talk about this because this seems to me to be a good example of a disjuncture in our culture. In one important way UNB student leaders are wrong. Again, I might agree with them and I might not agree with them, but they are wrong in the sense that in a capitalist society (like we have), dollar value (or, price) is determined differently than they suggest. It is this different that I find interesting and culturally important.
How do we determine value? How do we determine worth? How do we determine price? These are not all the same thing. In a capitalist society, price is determined by a series of variables that we call, for shorthand, supply and demand. I buy things at the price that I am willing to pay for them. Price is a market indication. A particular business offers to sell something -- say, a chair -- at a certain price. The consumer -- say, me -- now decides whether or not they want to pay that price. If I don't but I still want to the chair, I might make a counter offer, In effect I say "I want to buy the chair but I am only willing to pay X (X being less than the asking price) for it." The seller now has to make a decision: do they accept my offer or make their own counter, counter offer or do they let me walk away? You could think of this kind of negotiation -- a market transaction -- as something akin to a Facebook "buy and sell" group. People put stuff up, ask a price, and potential buyers accept the price or make counter offers.
Now, I recognize that outside of Facebook and garage sales, and other like venues this does not seem to happen. Most of the time, I go into a store, see a price and decide whether or not I will, buy the product after some quick calculation about my own needs, desire, and disposable income. Yet, there are echoes of the market negotiation I described even in this. While I might not negotiate with the clerk (who would likely not have the authority to change a price anyway), I do see the price as an offer (I will sell you X for $Y) and I decide whether or not I will pay that price. I know people who will not pay that price. They spend ages shopping for bargains. If enough people don't buy something and there is, then, too much stock, the business will put their items on sale, lowering the price. In effect, there is a bit of a collective negotiation going on. By not buying the product, we are telling the business that the price is too high and they need to lower it if a bunch of us are going to buy their product. Is this good? Is this bad? Capitalism is silent on this question. It simply is the way prices are supposed to function. The value of a product is not fixed. It is determined by what someone is willing to pay.
What the UNB student leaders showed us was another way of thinking about value. If you were to ask me, I'd suggest that their way of thinking is closer to the way most of us operate. The students drew a connection between their assessment of a products value (how good is it) and suggested that the price should fall because the quality is not as good the past product (that is, last year's education). That is, instead of asking "how much is this worth to me?" they are trying to make an assessment of the intrinsic value of the product and suggest that this should vary price. In the first, capitalist, example, price is determined by what a person is willing to pay. In the second, let's say non-capitalist, example, price is determined by the product's inherent value determined against a range of criteria.
Note, too, that that there are ethical overtones to this argument. It is wrong to charge someone more for something that is not as good as the product you delivered last year. Sometimes the language of "deserves" is featured as in "student deserve a break."
Now, without wading into the debate about this year's tuition, this is, I recognize, a complex situation and I won't throw up smoke and mirrors by pretending to have an easy answer. I will say something about tuition and education in a future blog, but for now I am focusing on the issue of value and price because what we see in this discussion is not just a disagreement over the price of a product. In fact, that happens all the time. It happens every time someone buys a car or a house or waits for a sale or goes online to comparison shop. Capitalism is built around differences of perspective on price. That is, in part, what we call "the market." What we have here is two different theories of value.
What the UNB students are saying is that tuition is not a product like others. Its value needs to be set in a different way (than what the market will bear) and that there are ethical, pedagogical, social justice, etc., consideration that should weigh in on the price of tuition. For reasons I will explain later, I agree with this perspective and I think most people who work in and/or administer universities do too. What it shows us, however, and this is the key point, is that a discussion of tuition is not just a discussion of tuition. It draws together not simply different perspectives but different ways of looking at prices and values. The result is that different stakeholders can end up talking past each other, not because they inherently disagree with each other (or, think alternative perspectives are misguided) but because they look at issues in dramatically different ways built on different preconditions.
All that sounds very vague but it begs a question: what are we to do about it? How do we stop talking past each other? How do we develop a meeting of minds on the subject? That is obviously easier said than done. I am sure that there are a fair number of people who actually want to be part of this discussion; I'd suggest that this is precisely what is needed. We need to do our jobs -- to be professors, for instance -- this year coming but we also need to initiate a discussion about the role and place of post-secondary education in our society. This discussion will be long but a first step, I think, is to begin from a consideration of value. If we want to look at the value of post-secondary education, what is it? How do we calculate it? Is there a price point -- tuition -- on which we can agree? None of these discussions will be easy but starting to think about the value of education outside of its economic value might be a starting point.
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