Are students out to get as little as possible?

Inside Higher Ed reveals that professors who are "easy" get higher student reviews.

This inspires Glenn Reynolds to comment, "Education, as they say, is the only consumer product where the consumer is out to get as little as possible for the money."

After thinking about this I realized it's perfectly rational for students to think this way. After all, students are paying for the credential and not the opportunity to learn. With the exception, perhaps, of laboratory or fieldwork classes, anything you learn in college can be learned for a lot less money by buying the textbook at Amazon.com--or even for free by going to a library.

However, the pecuniary return to the student depends upon his grades. A student with a 4.0 GPA who learns a little will get into a better graduate school and have better job opportunities than a student with a 3.0 GPA who learns a lot. So the student with easy professors truly does get more benefit from his college "education."

Comments

[F.A. Hayek]

Thanks to various redistribution schemes, there has been an artificial demand for higher education, which has led to a diluted supply. Not only does a 4-year degree not mean much nowadays, the quality of that degree isn't what it used to be. Now it's just a more expensive extension to high school, and the only people who have benefited are the suppliers. We've come to the point where you need a Masters degree in order to teach 6 year olds how to count (at least in NY, soon to come to your state). Twenty years from now, maybe you will need a PhD in order to work at Walmart.