Ladies and Gentlemen, while I hate to begin here with an apology, I’m afraid I have to. You see, I am about to do math, and that is never a good thing. You have my most heartfelt and sincere regret. However, I will endeavor to show all of my work so if I make any mistakes, everyone will know and subsequently bombard me with shoes.

The full price for this year at Gustavus was $42,258. Tuition at Gustavus this year was $33,100—this number does not include all of the fees, housing, and a meal plan. $33,100 is the sticker price for class time.

It is advised that a student at Gustavus takes four credits a semester, including a January Interim Experience course, which comes to nine credits a year. This means that Gustavus charges around $3,677.78 a credit. There are 13-and-a-half weeks of class this semester, and, on average classes are three hours per week. That means that this semester you will spend, again on average, 41 hours in a regular class meeting three times a week, 40.5 hours in a class meeting two times a week (because the half week at the end of the semester ends on a Wednesday and most twice-a-week only classes are on Tuesday and Thursday) and 55 hours in a class meeting four times a week.

Now, stay with me here because this is where it gets especially unnecessary. At $3,677.78 a credit that means you spend $89.70 per class period in a normal hour-long class which meets three times a week, $90.81 for a class meeting twice a week and $66.87 for a course meeting four times a week.

Many of you are no doubt asking what the point to all of that was. No doubt some of you have done this particular calculation before, perhaps upon deciding whether or not to miss a particular day of class. I myself was introduced to this calculation on the third or fourth day of class my first year when a kindhearted senior made sure I knew just how much I was paying to be in class that day.

The problem with all of this, moving past how much we all pay, is what it represents: the commoditization of education. While this is certainly nothing new—students at the University of Edinburgh paid a shilling per class to hear lectures given by the likes of Adam Smith and David Hume—it has become more and more prevalent with the rising costs of higher education and the growing sense that a four-year degree is the norm. We are taught to think of college as an investment: pay money now in order to get more at later date.

Is this the right way to treat education? Does this inspire the sort of learning that we want ourselves and our citizenry to engage in? Obviously since I’m the one writing this commentary, I feel that it is not and will thus subject you to the reasons why I believe that treating education as a commodity does us all a great disservice. When a person is thinking of taking a class solely for the value that it gives them on the market, that person is far more interested in the end result of the class, or the grade, than they are in the learning of the material.

Imagine a world where all the engineers and technicians made sure they got their “A”s but forgot everything they learned because they were not engaged in the material, but merely paying for the grade. Planes would crash, trains woudl collide and bridges would collapse. It’s time we take a step back and reevaluate the goal of education; is it purely economic, or is there more to learning?

If there is more to learning, then it is essential that we at Gustavus begin to examine a number of the things that we do. Perhaps the easiest, and most relevant to students, is major selection. Students here are often told to choose the major that they will enjoy the most or find the most rewarding, and that they will be able to find something to do with it later. My thoughts are that the choice of major should be based exclusively internal incentives. Advertising potential financial rewards or potential employment opportunities corrupts the intention of many of the liberal fields and sullies the message that students should choose a major for nonfinancial reasons. Then again I am slightly biased because, as a humanities major, I can take solace in the fact that I will be able to think very critically about the pizzas I’m delivering.

Oh, and before I go I’m introducing a new segment called: Down-Home Folksy Lundborg Family Wisdom in which I will send you a proverb from the list that my father has (which he got from his father). This week it is, “What is said when drunk has been thought out beforehand.”