"We're the Customer-We Pay the Tuition": Student Consumerism among Undergraduate Sociology Majors

Till. HIGHER EDUCATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE'S (HERI) annual surveys of college students continue to document rising levels of academic disengagement. In 1999, HERI reported that disengagement was escalating, with a record high 38 percent of students reporting they frequently felt bored in class, up from a low of 26 percent in 1985 (Higher Education Research Institute 1999). By 2000, a record 40 percent of students said they frequently felt bored in class (Higher Education Research Institute 2000; Wildavsky 2000). At the same time, the number of students reporting that they attend college to gain a well-rounded education and to formulate their values and goals declined from 71 percent in 1976 to 57 percent in 1999. This pattern applies to all groups of students, regardless of age, race, gender, attendance status, or the type of institution attended (Levine and Cureton 1998:115133). This growing culture of disengagement embraced by many college students seems rooted in a pervasive belief that the main purpose of higher education is economic (Flacks and Thomas 1998). HERI reported in 1999 that 75 percent of its respondents said they went to college in order to make more money-an increase of 21 percent since 1976 (Higher Education Research Institute). The most frequently cited reason viewing college as a means to increased earning potential is the marketplace (Bellah 1999:20). Many of these market forces are beyond the influence of individual colleges and universities or even whole categories of institutions. These factors include demographic, economic, and geographic shifts; cultural trends, including materialism and utilitarianism; and the dominance of market economics as a determining force (Neely 2000). Given students' apparent consumer orientation, it is not surprising that sociologists have begun to ask how college students view higher education. In an essay Academe, sociologist Robert Bellah (1999) portrays students who regard college as just another consumer marketplace. He describes undergraduates who, in arguing about a grade, said to their instructors, 'I'm paying this course,' as though they felt they weren't getting the value paid for (p. 20). Bellah's piece is just one in a series of recent critiques of contemporary student culture by sociologists (Delucchi and Smith 1997a; O'Brien and Howard 1996; Rau and Durand 2000; Shepperd 1997; Smith 2000). According to these authors, consumer sovereignty in higher education conflicts with the goals of effective pedagogy. An undue emphasis on customer service inverts the professorstudent relationship by vesting authority in students as customers. This inversion undermines the concept of merit by contributing to the pernicious idea that students *An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2000 Eastern Sociological Society (ESS) meetings in Baltimore. The authors would like to thank Susan Owens, Orlando Olivares, Helen Moore, and the three anonymous reviewers comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported, in part, by the Center For The Advancement Of Research and Teach-