ECON10: EDUCATION AS A COMMODITY

Education, which is not a public commodity, is often times misinterpreted as a purely public commodity because ideally the government should be able to provide education for everyone. A commodity is considered as a pure pubic good if it is unmanageable to exclude non-payers from consuming the good or if the good is not reduced upon consumption of superfluousconsumer. Although it is heartbreaking to know, higher education is not a purely public commodity since non-payers can easily be excluded in having educational benefits. In fact, we can even feel this situation in The University of the Philippines. Students cannot register for the next semester if they have an unsettled account.
Since it is already established that education is a commodity, we can compute for its elasticity. In this case, the students are considered as the consumers and the ratio between the percent change in enrollment and percent change in tuition fee are the two determining factors of the elasticity for education. Nowadays, it is already well-known that the demand for education is very inelastic. The students evidently react to the decrease or increase in price of tuition fee. On other words, when the tuition fee increases the revenue decreases and when the tuition fee decreases the revenue increases.
Addressing the disparity between the rich and the poor is really important because it somehow compensate for the idea that education is not a purely public commodity. One way to address the disparity between the twoin terms of education and its elasticity is the bracketing system. It is really effective even though it is quite ironic thatbracketing, which in definition includes labeling and separating individuals to groups, cansolve the difference between the rich and the poor. It is effective because everyone pays their tuition based on their income. By doing so, it becomes fair to those students who are less fortunate because they will likely manage to pay for the tuition fee that is