[jltsiren]

Students who see themselves as customers have come to the wrong place. Universities, and particularly research universities, are primarily places of scholarship. They offer a socially acceptable excuse to spend a few years learning about things that interest you, in an environment designed to support it. If you are not interested in that, you should find your education somewhere else.

Unfortunately politicians repurposed universities 2-3 generations ago as places for educating the middle class. The situation got particularly bad in the US. Unlike in many other countries, there is no clear separation between universities and institutes that offer more practically oriented higher education. Universities became expensive to attend, because the society started seeing education primarily as the student's investment in their own future. And instead of seeing all universities as more or less equivalent, Americans are particularly concerned about prestige and rank research universities consistently higher than those focusing on education.