Normally I don’t follow the comings and goings of cruise ships, but I did catch a small story about a Royal Caribbean vessel that docked in Sydney a couple of days ago. The Oceania II–also known as the “Scholar Ship”–is home, for a sixteen-week semester, to a couple of hundred students taking a cruise for credit.
It sounds pretty good: swimming pools, bars, exotic locales, students from around the world, a semester’s worth of academic credit, and, at the end, a “Certificate in Intercultural Leadership.”
According to the program’s website, students on board recently held a “Hunger Banquet”:
Over 90 percent of the onboard community participated in what amounted to a simulation of global hunger. Participants were divided into groups to represent the high, middle, and lower classes according to actual global wealth distribution. They were given the amounts and quality of food that people living in their respective class typically receive in a day.
The event brought about a new sense of awareness about the varied levels of privilege in the world and what actions we as global citizens can take to bring about a more fair and equitable system. The Social Justice and Service student group that organized the event is currently working on additional events that will build on the momentum of this hunger banquet, which was supported by an outreach program developed by Oxfam International.
All this new awareness about the varied levels of privilege comes at premium prices: US$21,395 per student for the semester. Cynics will no doubt make unflattering comparisons to the unfortunate Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen, who so wanted to know how the other 99% lived that she built a model village for herself; but that would hardly be fair. (The Scholar Ship apparently has a general fund to help pay the costs for the needy; how much that fund has in it is hard to say.)
There is something just as disturbing as the idea of a floating Petit Trianon, though: that a consortium of universities would think that such a program might be a good idea.
Universities seem to be grasping desperately at any source of funding. Students are not students anymore; they are a source of revenue. Public universities scramble madly to enroll students who pay the highest fees: those students are not local, but foreign or out of state students. In part this is a response to governments who believe that higher education is a products like any other, a product that needs to be sold, like toothpaste (or, for that matter, vacation cruises) to a consumer.
One problem: universities are not all that good at marketing. Apparently, Macquarie University thought it might make some money on this program; they expected some 600 students to sign up. A mere 200 are on board for the maiden cruise, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Who will pay for the shortfall? The university. And this is a problem: public universities do not usually have oodles of cash lying around. They’re usually trying to figure out ways to pay teaching assistants, buy books for libraries, or refurbish an antiquated lab or two. Subsidizing students on a cruise–which is what happens when too few people sign up for this hugely expensive venture–is not something university budgets ought to be spent on.
But there’s a bigger problem still. Governments–and, increasingly, managerially-minded university executives–do not understand who the real beneficiary of good university education is. They cling to the idea that the student (beg pardon, “client”) who enters the hallowed halls of the academy is the one who benefits; and because she or he gets a diploma (provided some cranky misguided academic does not fail the fee-paying critter), he or she is the beneficiary and consumer.
From a state’s point of view, though, this is silly. It is true that a college education increases (on average) incomes–but having a well-educated population is good for everyone. Places that think of universities and colleges as investments do better. For a long, California made a college education virtually free; it has reaped the benefits many times over. Think, for instance, of the benefits to California that the University of California system provides. California has better engineers, better teachers, better writers, better computer scientists, better historians, and a better life than it would without the UC system. And those better people make the whole state a better place.
Who benefits when universities cater to those who can post $21,395 for a cruise? Who benefits when we treat universities as “revenue centers” rather than as investments in our collective future?
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