Commercialization in education is Ethical or non Ethical

I appreciate the topic given by my opponent as it is one of the most trending topics in today's world. 'Commercialization of education' is a very common and a simple phenomenon these days and perhaps my opponent has made use of such technical language as to make it seem a 'complex' topic. My learned friend has merely taken China in consideration while explaining about the commercialisation. But I would rather expand the area of study. Aptly said by my opponent that commercialisation of education will lead to a drastic change in the traditional education styles involving a similar change in student-teacher relationship. My opponent said "...education in its Confucian and therefore Chinese cultural tradition has never been for profit and profit only." Indeed, I agree that today almost all institutions are driven by profit motive but are we still in a position to generalise the statement? Perhaps no. Some organisations still function to serve the society. Consider this. An orphanage or a school for the blind with minimal fees for education, work for the societal welfare and not specifically for profit motive. If we creep out of China and look at countries still in their developing stage, there are government run organisations with a fee as affordable by even the poorest sections of the society, which run on the welfare motive as juxtaposed with profit orientedness. Are we still in a position to say that profit is the sole driving motive for commercialisation? Perhaps the fee that is being charged is only as much as is needed to fund the institution to function smoothly. Further, studies have shown that through commercialisation of education, students have come into the contact of experienced and expert teaching wherein, if we take the example of new coaching centres being opened, we say that expert and professional teachers who are recruited pass on this knowledge to the students in the most effective manner. So if students are eventually benefiting from this modern system of education why not adopt it and use it as a means for national development? "The administrative level would require running the institute like an enterprise, focusing on budgetary cost-effect,..." 'Pro' used the word 'cost-effect driven' system which may have certain other connotations as against how I interpret the terminology. So what he really means to say is that commercialised centres will actually try to cut down on costs keeping a focus on their budgets and profits. As an addition to this, in a rather brief manner, what he meant was that it would lead to incompetency in the teaching process. And so it concludes that commercialisation will lead to cheating on the customers, befooling them which is ultimately unethical. But if this is what he meant then may be he is wrong. Because incompetency in teachers will ultimately lead to students under-performing which subsequently will lead to less number of enrollments of students in the next session. And going by what my dearest opponent earlier said, if profit is what really induces commercialisation, then the very concept of 'focussing on budgetary cost-effect' and cost-cutting (in a need to earn more profits) becomes wholly void. Another issue highlighted by Pro was that it poses obstructions to the poor who are in dearth of money to start their education. "... the role money plays in getting into education in the first place, which may block opportunities for many aspiring poor to start with." To some extent, agreed! But then here, there comes something like 'free-funded education' which is provided by governments of various developing nations specially in the interest of the poor who are not in a position to fund the education process. Or if still my opponent doesn't keep terms with me on this point I can perhaps give a solution to this. It is not something very new to this world, but something which some institutions have been doing from the past. An exam is held to determine the intelligence level of a student and depending upon the marks obtained by him, he is given a relevant discount on the tution fee, which to some extent solves the problem. While browsing the net I found something very interesting. There is this excerpt from that article relating to benefits of commercialisation of education. "Firstly, commercialization of higher education generally results in state-of-the-art facilities for all students as money is no longer a constraint. Moreover as universities are free to enter into corporate ties with variety of industries they can improve and upgrade their infrastructure through corporate funding. The better infrastructure ultimately benefits the students. The students also get the opportunity to get trained in corporate firms and get valuable industry exposure because of a Memorandum of Understanding that is in place between the university and the organization. Another boon of commercialization of higher education is the fact that surveys found privatized universities being more professional in their approach than their public counterparts." So I would end this here. Hope the voters as well as my opponent understand what I have tried to explain them. Hope to see some strong argument from the Pro side.