Granì (Jul 2019)
Economism, commercialization and massification of university education (on the example of american and european educational systems)
Abstract
The main point of the article is to disclose the essence of the phenomena of economism, commercialization, and massification of the university education. It has been noted that the massification and especially commercialization of education are quite dangerous for the classical institute of education. The era of globalization, informatization and mass consumption affects significantly the development of educational institutions. In addition, the last decades are characterized by the modernization of society and higher education, focused on the development of market relations. As a result of higher education reforms, a peculiar environment of the commercial education has appeared, which requires the existence of new rules of interaction, status-role relationships, value-normative formations. Commercialization, in fact, appears to be a kind of challenge of our time; however, in society there are scientific disputes about how large-scale this process is, what form it takes and how it affects the quality of educational services. Consideration of the American and European models of higher education makes it possible to understand the essence of the emergence in the scientific literature of such concepts as «Academic capitalism», «Market-type University» and «Entrepreneurial University», to analyze the emergence of private education, profit and to determine the priority task of commercialization. ‘Academic capitalism’ is a policy of higher education aimed at the transformation of universities from a center of liberal arts to the entrepreneurial periphery, where the scientific research is conducted exclusively with commercial purposes. The reasons for the emergence of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial university have been defined in the article as they are very different in society. On the one hand, universities need new sources of income in the context of reduced public funding, on the other - the companies themselves seek to remain competitive in global markets, they are interested in new scientific knowledge and results that can provide universities for them. In general, the phenomena of entrepreneurship, the importance of entrepreneurial universities for the development of the educational system, their extreme role in innovation, corporate culture and the transformation of the social process as a whole have not been revealed in the sociological l iterature sufficiently.
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