Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Over the last fifty years, various social and economic factors have led to the commodification of education. This study examines the most salient, especially neoliberalism and debt-based consumerism, and it summarizes the associated decline in educational standards related to the government’s advocacy of higher education for all. At the heart of this analysis is the perennial conflict between collectivism and individualism and between classical liberalism and conservatism. The research explores how the rise of socialism in the United States and the failure of Keynesian economics in the 1970s fundamentally altered the economic, political, and social dynamics that made the commodification of education not only possible but inevitable.