Commercializing Education - A Rant
Hi everyone, today I want to rant a bit about a recent development in education and research which is only getting worse over the last decade and which got me worried.
I had to notice that education and research are being overrun by companies trying to get some easy money out of it by creating some standards only they can control which they will then make the default standard for everyone and everyone has to start paying them.
Just yesterday I was looking up the prices of language tests for my girlfriend I found out that taking the TOEFL test costs 250$ in Brazil or 246 Euros in Europe.
Similar other tests are not much better with their fees but for me this price is absurd. People should be motivated to take these tests and the cost of the test should match the cost the government has with these. But, since these tests are limited to some agencies and also controlled by these, these companies enrich themselves on the back of students which have no choice.
Normally, prices should be driven by supply and demand which automatically finds a balanced price.
But as soon as you got a company which has the only available product this balance does not exist anymore. And the company can move its price wherever they want since the customers have no choice.
Which is why Healthcare should also be regulated since you can't choose to take certain meds, either you buy and take them, or you die.
Which lead to the ridiculous pricing situation we have with this kind of exams nowadays.
Similar to that, in the last years, publication on conferences and in scientific journals got immensely important for universities to maintain their funding. While that's an obvious development, again, certain companies were able to create a monopoly on this which leads to researchers having to pay 500$+ for the event + hotel + flight and at the same time other researchers have to voluntarily review the journal and conference submissions without receiving a single cent for it.
That's what I call a win/win situation for the company, with no costs, high income.
And if someone then wants to access the pdf he has to pay 25$ for each pdf or a few hundred dollars a year.
And the author of the paper, the reviewers, the universities who produced them get nothing out of it.
Fortunately, researchers are starting to revolt against this, but my guess is that this will take a while until something changes there.
As noted [here], these companies should pay the researches who review and who submit their scientific publications for maintaining their billion dollar industry and not the other way around.
In the end, the current system delays research since excellent researches of poorer universities, countries or families aren't able to make the impact their work should have, especially because almost no one reads articles published on conferences of a low impact factor. At the same time, researchers spend money on these conferences and time reviewing which they could use to dedicate this time to research to bring our society further forward and not to enrich a handful of companies.
As said initially, this topic got me really worried also about the state of our society where neither the governments nor the big universities have the guts to speak up against these abusive billion dollar companies. Especially since any of the top 10 universities would be able to create and host a low-cost academic journal and conference which a comparable impact factor if they'd have the guts to do this.
Additionally, if you really want to read one of these scientific articles for which they charge all this money for, in most cases you can get these articles for free just by asking one of the authors politely. They don't get any of the money anyway.
I really hope this will get better over the next years because these are resources which are missing universities and are, therefore, directly paid by us taxpayers as well.
Until the next time.
