Giving Compass' Take:

· Although numerous higher education reforms have been well-intentioned, EdSurge reports on the McDonaldization of schools resulting from the adoption of business practices that take away the core values of the institution.

· How are these practices hurting students in college? How does it affect student outcome and future success?

· As new issues continue to surface with higher education, students are turning to faster and cheaper alternatives.

Do you want fries with that education?

The question is one that many professors fear is essentially coming to colleges, as higher-ed leaders adopt practices from businesses in an attempt to rethink their operations. There’s even a growing body of scholarly work that outlines a critique against the corporatization of college—arguing that even when reforms are well-intentioned, they are making campuses more like burger franchises than centers of learning and research.

One of the most-cited versions of the critique is the 2002 book “The McDonaldization of Higher Education,” by Dennis Hayes and Robin Wynyard. The formulation is meant to provoke, and the authors boil their argument into four bullet points (adopting the style and spirit of the business books they critique). They argue that when college leaders adopt corporate practices in their reforms, they seek to bring efficiency, predictability, calculability and control to the academic process, at the expense of the core values of the academy.

Read the full article about the McDonaldization of higher ed by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge.