# PTE RL #19: The Commercialization of Higher...

Re-tell Lecture #19 - Level 3 - Feeds Speaking + Listening

> You will hear a lecture. When it ends, you have 10 seconds to prepare, then 40 seconds to retell the lecture in your own words.

## Explanation

The speaker argues that higher education has become a consumer product, where universities and lenders profit from student debt. The lecture criticizes the commodification of education, comparing it to other financial markets where loans are bundled and sold, ultimately exploiting students.

## Hints

- Focus on the speaker's main argument regarding how higher education is being treated as a business.
- Note the speaker's comparison between student loans and other financial products like mortgages.

## Transcript

1.2 trillion dollars of debts for diplomas make it abundantly obvious that higher education is a consumer product you can buy. All of us talk about education, just as the economists do now, as an investment that you make to improve the human stock by training them for work. As an investment you make to sort and classify people so that employers can hire them more easily. The U.S. News and World Report ranks colleges just as the consumer report rates washing machines. The language is full, peppered with barbarisms. Teachers are called service providers. Students are called consumers. Sociology and Shakespeare and soccer and science, all of these are content. Student debt is profitable, only not on you. Your debt fattens the profit of the student loan industry, the two 800-pound gorillas of which, Sallie Mae and Navient, posted last year a combined profit of $1.2 billion. And just like home mortgages, student loans can be bundled and packaged and sliced and diced and sold on Wall Street. And colleges and universities that invest in these securitized loans profit twice, once from your tuition, and then again from the interest on debt. With all that money to be made, are we surprised that some in the higher education business have begun to engage in false advertising, in bait and switch, in exploiting the very ignorance that they pretend to educate?

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