Calling it their "brand" is one of the main reasons that people see them as elitist.

Tone-deaf, too.

The word "brand" may make your teeth itch, but it is a current turn of speech we are stuck with.

...who oppose the very notion of educating the vast majority of us who depend on publicly funded education.

It was my mother (born 1924, scarred for life by the Great Depression) who taught me that pursuing knowledge was nearly everything -- I think it was the Holy Grail to her. All her children went to college, all worked their way through, all graduated, and this was a blue-collar family.

Sure I heard the word elite bandied about, but it meant the economic elite. However, like so much else in the GOP's Gingrich-inspired twisting of meaning, by the time I was happily working toward a midlife PhD, it turned out to mean intellectuals. America's always-latent anti-intellectualism had been nurtured to full bloom.

By now, "elites" has been twisted to mean anyone who pursues a higher education. In other words, why should "our" taxes go to "their" college education? Except "they" means "you." You and yours are the target. Keep that in mind before parroting anything coming from the VRWC.

And where in my "broadside" did I say you were neither?

I said you were hostile. I stand by that.

It was an unacceptably rude reply. I regret it, and I apoiogize for posting it.

I will delete it, if you'd like.

You're equating a buzzword with a much larger issue without actually bothering to provide much evidence to support your contention. Just stating that using the term brand means students are reduced to consumers isn't particularly convincing.

The fact that you can't present the case and instead resort to sneering condescending name calling suggests you don't have a real argument other than being convinced you're right and anybody who disagrees with you is stupid.

Why shouldn't colleges put students first via branding and selling the benefits and culture of that school? Students and their families are paying a great deal to go there. A student is making a huge investment of time and money. They should get as much information about the school they are going to. In an era where a substantial part of the public is distrustful of colleges as too liberal, when state and federal funding has dropped, at the same time as technology costs have skyrocketed and people are starting to become cost conscious of student loans (although that is also as a result of wage stagnation both for parents and students after graduation) and in a world where universities haven't found a way to benefit from increased efficiency, they have an obligation to find a way to sell the benefits of higher education.

It makes it worse, in fact.

But it doesn't help them distance themselves from the impression that they are--as an industry--principally a money-making venture.

Yet students are definitely treated as customers. Curriculum is a balancing act between accreditation and consumer wants. However, I'm beginning to have a problem with the term "customer" as well. That term connotes a "money making venture" as you wrote; however, my college doesn't make very much money at all. We don't charge high tuition rates. You could argue that we are dealing on volume, but our numbers don't fluctuate much from year to year. We have a weird set up where we rent our buildings from the city. The original mission statement for the college included the phrase "A school without buildings or professors". The point was that the city owned the school, and the school worked for the people of the city.

Then again, my college is only one of many, and I suspect its egalitarian atmosphere can be traced back to its hippy origins.

My husband worked in industry for 15 years and community college education for 22, plus another 5 years back in industry post-retirement and we had many conversations about that.

Education and health-care have their own, far different, paradigms. We liberals know, or should know, that. We should stick to arguing those merits, not engage in any argument over how to make either of those entities "more like business."

universities.

The universities and our public schools are what have made America successful.

It's another example of the lack of patriotism of Republicans.

They prefer a nation of stupid sheep to a nation of creative humans with active brains.

Republicans -- the party of the ignorant.

Another 12 institutions had between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per student.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment#Endowments_per_student

Given the surge in the stock market since 2015, there must surely be more today.

Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford are investment funds with a universities attached.

...People who are able to get a first rate education and not have any student loan debt and to have most of their 4 year Undergraduate education taken care of....

Go Quakers....

Think of the countless lives saved by their students, the huge number of jobs created by the inventions of their students. The glory of man they have spun off. The tremendous good done by the Gates Foundation is a drop in the bucket compared to the public good created by those schools. They are literally the god damned best things on this planet bar none.

They are not endowment funds which own a school. Those schools are mighty engines of human improvement which completely dwarf the scale of the endowments.

I can support an excise tax on their endowments but if we don’t do that it is a trivial detail.

open their eyes.

We'd all benefit from it. Just sayin'

On second thought, the universities are caught in a bind because the new Trumpy motto is "Our ignorance is as valid as your expertise." Before Trump, the institutes of higher learning never had to justify themselves.

Nearly 40 years of constant propaganda will do that. But I put this under the category of "they hate us because they ain't us".

It's sick. And it makes our society sick and stupid.

My mom has been in public education her whole life and has been attacking the GOP education budget cuts as long as I've been alive.

And she gets hammered by our friends and neighbors who are Fox bots who are conditioned to hate anything public or government funded. Because Fox News sucks. We've mostly remained silent but now we feel like we can't hold it in any longer because the longer you remain silent on this or any issue, the more those scumbags win.

The GOP has become unrecognizable to anyone who remembers actual small-c conservatives or small-r republicans.

They've replaced actual small government minded conservatism with just barrage of hateful, anti left, anti liberal, anti education rhetoric that borders on Nazism. It's dangerous, and if we can't fix it, it will only get worse.

business. And now they run the Republican Party and sometimes even the country.

What a bunch.

And the only foreign language we need is русский

which is usually one of the starting points of a totalitarian government.

My husband taught his subject at CC and seeded his Computer Information Systems students all over town. They have 2-year career programs and programs that will take you to state college or university.

Been a sound man for years. Learned a lot about new digital processes and facing retirement it insures at least some jobs/income that I otherwise wouldn't be able to count on.

see that you went to college.

I have also been copying and pasting the definition of liberal and conservative for years....the definitions SAY IT ALL.