Here's a good quote about education as commodity (what it is becoming) from the British scene from an online journal called Fast Marxism:
According to this logic, the university must provide a ‘service’ in which the student ‘consumer’ can measure the value of their ‘investment’ in quantifiable terms: from the ‘quality’ of the education they receive as measured in RAE and QAA scores to the ‘real world’ financial pay-off they can look forward to in the long term. The value of education in this sense can be seen as a straightforward instrumental means toward the no less instrumentalized end of improving one’s chances in the labor market. Universities must accept the need for “reform” - that is, the re-orienting from their original purpose toward training and honing the ‘transferable’ skills required by the ‘knowledge economies’ of advanced capitalism.