Research Blog # 3 : Privatization

The topic of privatization, which we’ve discussed in class and in our blogs, greatly prompted my choosing racial and ethnic influences on college major choice as a research topic. The privatization of higher education takes form in a loss of public funding, replaced by private funding. The reflection is a transition from public to private interest. Higher education is no longer designed to best suit the masses.

A large consequence of the privatization of higher educational has been a loss of curriculum diversity. Students no longer study the topics they find most interesting or the fields they are passionate about. They chose their majors based on which will potentially prove them the most lucrative career. Biographies of Hegemony, by Karen Ho, discusses how unfortunate the connectedness of money and education is. The vast majority of students today graduate in finance, economics, and business. The majors our society deems “practical”. Majors in social science, literature, foreign languages, and the humanities, have accordingly been abandoned on the basis that there is no money to be made in those fields. These facts demonstrate how privatization has drained higher education of its curriculum diversity. As put by Karen Ho, the diversity of a curriculum once reflected “the rich development of a culture”. Higher education is no longer designed to enrich or develop a culture by exposing new generations of students to a variety of academic disciplines. Higher education today is designed to satisfy private interest.

Because tuition funds have become a primary source of revenue for universities, the cost of higher education has become largely un affordable to the majority of the population; a direct factor influencing college major choose. Our discussions, and research on, privatization in higher education has prompted me to choose the research topic I have. I would like to dig deeper and uncover what other factors influence trends in college major choices. What are the root causes of those factors? How do racial and ethnic influences tie into economic backgrounds? What other influences does money, the root of privatization, have on higher education, that we have not yet uncovered? Privatization has sparked my interest to further research the factors that influence trends in college major choices today.