Commodities as Students, Commodities as Workers

Too often we find ourselves vexed by the impetuous insincerity that we share as a conglomeration of cultures and of peoples. In the US the attitude of commodity no longer only applies to the products being bought and sold on the stock market, in the grocery store, and on the internet, but also of people. Numbers fill my head thinking about it, nearly forty million homeless, nearly the same amount unemployed. We buy and trade the lives of people, their well being, their health, their children, and their parents. In a word people are no longer people, we are cattle. Driven to work for people willing to treat us as cattle, only to be turned around and shot when our usefulness is no longer viable.

In the university level, as many students have experienced, we are treated in the same way. No longer to universities see students as prospective community leaders, businessmen, or career seeking individuals worthy of being educated; no, sadly, we too have become a commodity to the university. State or private, we are all a large cash cow to them. Avowed to some virtual control of our futures, of the monies we pour into the school, millions each year. Meanwhile professors are cut, class sizes doubled, workloads over extended, and tuitions hiked. If a student disagrees with a professor they are hurtled through a maze of bureaucracy only to not see any change and often to be accused themselves of misconduct. Oh but it's an education, no? Readying you for the future? Yet only fifty percent of students to graduate this year nationwide will find jobs in their field, and of the latter half, only fifty percent of them will find jobs at all.
Those who do find jobs, not in their field, will be treated the same as they were in college, as fodder, a commodity; and this will be the case because if you don't want to work there, there is half a dozen other people, in your same situation, trying to pay off bills and student loans, who would love to have your job. When people argue that college does not prepare students for the real world, in some sense this is correct, in others, those people could not be further from the truth.
And what about that conglomeration of cultures, is not college meant to be the place to exchange freely one's ideas, thoughts, and art? Not any longer. Universities marginalize students, molding them into the majority culture rather than exchanging cultures. Novelty is a rarity, languished by some, heartily cast aside both most who just want to pass the class and get to the next subject. Of course a liberal arts school does not help the matter, requiring X amount of general credits, often in subjects students do poorly in, or suffer through for the sake of it receiving its credit value. Why, stated under the guise of being "well rounded" and having experience in many areas, is the simple truth. Greed.

Yes greed, the more students are marginalized the more money the University makes, the fewer professors on staff needing to be paid the more money is put towards bonuses for the administrators. Students lose out, professors become over worked, remain under paid, and neither walk away from the school year capable of supporting themselves, either financially or mentally.
And we wonder why the society at large complains about the state of education. Public schools are abysmal, losing more money each year and expected to maintain or even better the students' test results. These students are already cynics, despising education by the time they leave high school. What are high school diplomas worth today anyway? A job flipping burgers at McDonalds, getting a minimum wage managerial position at Kohls or Wal-Mart and working your way up until you make fifty grand a year, wooo. It is almost the same with a Bachelor's degree.

We are stuffed, fattened up by television ads, and social stigmas, we sit on our asses bouncing to the cues of popular culture hanging on every word that Oprah spits out, that the Jerry Springer "guests" yell and scream; we are the buttered up rump roasts being stripped of our humanity, our vox populi as we sit and drool at the Television, at the radio, read the nuances of our history with disregard. Slumping through the days drinking and sleeping and complaining without one instance of self recognition of fault and retribution; as our banks fall, as our economy crumbles, as children starve to death on the streets or are beaten and murdered, raped and battered. We think "what is good on tonight" or "I wonder if I'll get sloshed tonight", and all the while we become more and more the commodities easily traded away and forgotten.
It is time to wake up, time to no longer be the mass populace, the statistics that live and breed here!