Education will Free you! NOT!

Yesterday I received the following email from the FORTUNE magazine's Education Program. FORTUNE, along with CNN and others, is a part of Time Warner Inc.
***
Hello Professor Gopal,
Time is running out on the offer we recently mailed to you. . .
Please join us this semester. Your students can subscribe to FORTUNE Magazine for just $10 for one year or $9 for six months* through the FORTUNE Education Program. They’ll have access to current business insights from industry leaders and decision-makers related to your course for less than $1 an issue.
When you submit 5 or more student subscriptions through the FORTUNE Education Program, you’ll receive your own complimentary subscription and free teaching resources – including quizzes, assignments, discussion starters and more – prepared for you and ready to use in class. For fall 2008, we’re also offering a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com with 25 or more student subscriptions.
***

I would call this offer a bribe, intended to 'motivate' me to enroll students in this program. This is yet another example of corporations doing with teachers and academics what the pharma companies have been doing with doctors- offer freebies to get them to prescribe their products.

$$ Today's WSJ has an article titled "The Best Ways To Get Loans For College Now."
it mentions a site www.fynanz.com, where "students post the amount they want, the interest rate they are willing to pay and a few details about themselves and their studies. In many cases, the "loan" involves money from multiple lenders, some offering as little as $50 each. Fynanz, which has made 20 loans averaging about $6,500 each since it began lending two months ago, collects a 1% fee for processing the loans."

It is too bad that the education process allows the slick corporations to get their first dibs on the future income stream of the students of today. Caveat emptor applies to students buying 'education' as well.