Commodities, Class, and Sustainibility on Campus

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of capital goods and the means of production, with the creation of goods and services for profit. ^{1, 2} 

 

 

Commodity:

 

A commodity is a product that satisfies the wants a needs of a demanding public.

 

 

Water, soda, and other types of drinks are a commodity bought on campus.  The price for these products has risen in price over the years due to the demand for drinks on campus.  People can easily just drink FREE water from a fountain, but they instead choose to buy it.  Companies such as Dasani (as seen here) spend a lot of money and time convincing people that they need bottled water or soda instead of regular tap water.

 

 

 

 

The main commodity on campus is the tuition that a student would pay to attend Bellevue College.  Associated with tuition costs are assessments to find out where you will place in a math or English class, fees for your initial application to join the school, fees to pay for a bus pass (if you cannot afford to pay to park- see below), fees for a student ID card.  If a student is unable to pay for most of these products, then he or she may not be able to attend school.



 

Students pay to park their vehicles on campus.  If a student cannot afford to pay to park on campus, then they will have to walk, or take a bus.

 

Books are very expensive to buy on campus.  Students pay a lot of money to use these books during school.

 

 

 

Social Class:

Social class, as in a class society, is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes. 3.

 

 

If a person cannot afford to pay for tuition completely, there are different options.  A student can get financial aid, which consists of grants, loans, or scholarships.  Grants and scholarships are not a commodity, as  no one makes a profit off of them.  Loans, however, are.

 

 

A student loan gives a student money to pay for school.  A student, however, does have to pay this money back upon leaving school.  Often times, students will end up paying off these loans for decades after graduating school.  Companies such as ACS financial, make a lot of profit from the interest earned on these loans.

 

 

 

Sustainibility:

 

This means the ability to endure over long periods of time.  When applying this to a college campus, we look at ways we reduce, reuse, and recycle.

 

 

 

 

 

Near all drains on the campus, we see these plates that inform a student just wear exactly his or her liquid waste will drain to- in this case East Creek.  This may make a student stop to contemplate his or her choice before dumping used motor oil in the drain.   

 

As you can see here we have two waste receptacles.  The blue one is for a special type of waste called recycling.  Paper, plastic, glass, and cardboard go into the blue bin and are sent of to sorting facilities where people put them into their proper group.  At this point the products are melted down, mushed up, or shredded and then reconstituted to create a new product, or a similar product to what they were initially. 

 

Sources:

1. Chris Jenks. Core Sociological Dichotomies. London, England, UK; Thousand Oaks, California, USA; New Delhi, India: SAGE. p. 383.
2. Capitalism Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved 4 January 2013.
3. ^ Grant, J. Andrew (2001). "class, definition of". In Jones, R.J. Barry. Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy: Entries A-F. Taylor & Francis. p. 161.