The Economics of Education

All the economic and numeric references strikes a chord with me during this week's readings. The ones that I wish to highlight are: Charlesworth's " student-as-consumer", Leonhardt's "socioecomonic theme", as well as Douthat's views on student's"GPA".
I agree with Charlesworth and her views on how students have shifted from a civic minded education to a consumer mentality. The"consumer" mentality lends itself to all aspects of American culture and to most of her citizens. One of the nation's (if not the world's) most powerful cities is New York City,which from conception has been all about commerce. The settlers bought Manhattan Island for a meager 22 dollars (or so the lengend has it). NYC is one of the few great cities to have no religious or war-related origins. Its simply all about the economics. The reason I bring this up to show that Americans have this consumer mentality embedded into our fiber because we have a commerce based society. We have a strong tendency to distill everything into a game of give and take. College is the norm now a days because it will give us job opportunities and we will take from it the GPA that we need in order to fulfill those said job opportunities.
However things aren't so black and white when you factor in Leonhardt's theme of how socioeconomics play a role in the equation. Socioeconomics turns everything into shades of gray. There are significant contingencies of wether or not one will have a successful collegiate experience based on their economic status. The static that Leonhardt shared that "only 41% of low-income students ...[of] four year colleges manage to graduate within five years...[while] 66% of high-income students did" so in the same amount of time was startling. It concerns me that there is such a discrepancy. Especially when you consider that the factors aren't always GPA related, which is now the leading guidepost for job placement. To which Douthtat indicates by saying, "What you do, in turn hinges in no small part on what is on your resume, including your GPA." Now if the students who are in college were legitimately earning their GPA's 100% of the time we would have a different story with different "citizens" and a different system of education, but since that is not the case we have the tale of grade inflation. Thus far I have no experience with grade inflation at college, but I have a catalogue of such experiences from high school, both personal and observational. This reality of grade inflation lowers the integrity of the educational system yet helps the students obtain a higher position in world. And since I believe one's knowledge base is an ever present shadow I would argue that grade inflation lowers the integrity of the student as well and may even bring damage to the way they are able to position themselves within the world.
I have no clear solutions to offer. Only a belief that if students return to the mentally that their education is apart of a bigger picture which encompasses their country and also the world at large, then Education may find itself on the road towards salvation.