Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in a superb essay:
The Effective Altruist mode of understanding the “good” served by philanthropy relies on quantifiable metrics focusing on, for instance, the numbers of lives saved in selecting causes to be supported. This appears at first a noble notion (who wouldn't want to save lives?) but one that calculates the “value” of those lives in terms of their future productivity. A life saved is not saved for the pleasure of the one who lives it, or the people and communities they touch, but rather for their economic value, for their potential contributions to the capitalist production, extraction, and funneling of wealth into the hands of what coincidentally turns out to be the donor class.
What I want us to take a look at is the degree to which higher education, its leaders, its benefactors, and even its publics have knowingly or unknowingly gotten interpellated into this mode of thinking about the work we do on campus and the students we do it for. Our students have long since been redirected away from understanding themselves as anything like academic citizens — full members in a shared community of learning — into becoming consumers of of a commercial product designed to deliver an individual benefit.
And that “individual benefit” likely is calculated only in monetary terms — the value of a university education determined solely by the annual income of the degree-holder.