what IS being bought

A correspondent points me to an interesting point made on rateyourstudents.blogspot.com

The issue is the "students as customers" but with some interesting points...

The argument is that each particular student expects individual service, whereas the university as an institution really deals with the students collectively.

In particular, the university as part of its business has to maintain standards, part of its brand value is to sustain its reputation and the added value of its diplomas. This is the crude market value of the broader goal of university to educate and create a liberally educated general populace, as well as a new generation of academics.

But, for any individual student, the marginal cost to the university of just giving them "the grade they want" is negligible - I mean, letting one through who doesn't deserve it won't really degrade the brand value of the university, much. And we know it is done in a lot of places, even at fancy Ivy League places...

But, if the university does let this slide, once, then you hit a slippery slope, and next thing you have 10,000++ students with bogus grades and degrees and we might as well sell them by e-mail sent out at 2 am from hacked ukrainian PCs.
Not good.

Now, we could go all microeconomical on this, and calculate the marginal value of our reputation per unit crap student, and then hit their parents up for this extra cost plus a margin to cover our embarrassment (suitably laundered through the alumni association or some such, of course), or, we could subvert them.

If we get to the students, get them to see our point of view, then they won't want an unearned "A".
We know this - take a good class and have them self-assign grades, most will grade themselves lower than you will!

We can still win this. Just give us a few thousand more PhDs, some wheels and helicopters.
I think we will definitely want some helicopters.
Oh, and no micromanagement from the admin, eh?