Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education

Roger Brown, Helen Carasso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135094379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The marketisation of higher education is a growing worldwide trend. Increasingly, market steering is replacing or supplementing government steering. Tuition fees are being introduced or increased, usually at the expense of state grants to institutions. Grants for student support are being replaced or supplemented by loans. Commercial rankings and league tables to guide student choice are proliferating with institutions devoting increasing resources to marketing, branding and customer service. The UK is a particularly good example of this, not only because it is a country where marketisation has arguably proceeded furthest, but also because of the variations that exist as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland increasingly diverge from England.

In Everything for Sale, Roger Brown argues that the competitive regime that is now applicable to our Higher Education system was the logical, and possibly inevitable, outcome of a process that began with the introduction of full cost fees for overseas students in 1980. Through chapters including:

• 
  
  

• Markets and Non-Markets

• 
  
  

• The Institutional Pattern of Provision

• 
  
  

• The Funding of Research

• 
  
  

• The Funding of Student Education

• 
  
  

• Quality Assurance

• 
  
  

• The Impact of Marketisation: Efficiency, diversity and equity;

He shows how the evaluation and funding of research, the funding of student education, quality assurance, and the structure of the system have increasingly been organised on market or quasi-market lines.

As well as helping to explain the evolution of British higher education over the past thirty years, the book contains some important messages about the consequences of introducing or extending market competition in universities' core activities of teaching and research.

This timely and comprehensive book is essential reading for all academics at University level and anyone involved in Higher Education policy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Our reforms tackle three challenges. First, putting higher education on a sustainable footing. We inherited the largest public deficit in post-war history, requiring spending cuts across government. By shifting public spending away from teaching grants and towards repayable tuition loans, we have ensured that higher education receives the funding it needs even as substantial savings are made to public expenditure. Second, institutions must deliver a better student experience; improving teaching, assessment, feedback and preparation for the world of work. Third, they must take more responsibility for increasing social mobility.

(DBIS, 2011a, Executive Summary, paragraph 3)

What is at stake here is not primarily the question of whether this group of graduates will pay a little more or a little less towards the costs of their education, even though that may seem (particularly to those in marginal seats) to be the most potent element electorally. What is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards redefining them in terms of a purely economistic calculation of value and a wholly individualist conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’.

(Collini, 2010, p. 8)

Introduction

The reform programme announced by the Coalition Government in November 2010 and incorporated in the subsequent (June 2011) White Paper (DBIS, 2011a) is the most radical in the history of UK higher education, and amongst the most radical anywhere. The main change is that in future most of the money universities receive for undergraduate teaching will come through the student fee, with direct state support limited to a small number of priority areas. The limit on the fee institutions can charge Home and EU students will be nearly tripled, from £3,375 in 2011–12 to £9,000 in 2012–13. There will be a partial lifting of the controls on student places to enable some more popular institutions to expand although, since overall numbers are capped, this can only be at the expense of others. Another key proposal is for the rules for market entry to be modified to facilitate the participation of private providers, as well as to encourage more further education (FE) colleges to offer higher education at much lower cost. All of this will be underpinned by a more ‘student friendly’ quality assurance regime with much greater information about institutional provision. Instead of being seen as a public service, higher education is now viewed as something that primarily benefits private individuals.

The Government argues that these reforms are needed to put UK, or at least English, higher education on a sustainable footing whilst reducing claims on the taxpayer. By putting ‘students at the heart of the system’ – to refer to the title of the White Paper – both quality and efficiency will be raised as institutions respond more effectively to students’ interests and needs through greater competition and information. To quote the independent review report on which much of the reform programme is based:

Students are best placed to make the judgement about what they want to get from participating in higher education.

(Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, 2010, p. 29)

However, other explanations have been offered.

One is that the reforms are simply a ‘kneejerk’ response to the economic crisis that began in the autumn of 2008. This appears to be the view of the Official Opposition (Frankel, 2011). Another is that they are part of a wider government attack on the public sector, involving increasing privatisation and a shifting of responsibility from the state to the individual, as can be seen in the health service, local government, social care and social housing, and which goes well beyond what may be needed to respond to the crisis in the public finances (Taylor-Gooby and Straker, 2011). However, the view that is offered here is that they are the latest, but also the most significant and far-reaching, stage in a long process of marketisation under which, through the policies of successive governments of all political parties since 1979, British higher education – or at least the core functions of student education and academic research – has increasingly been provided on market or ‘quasi-market’ lines. This phenomenon is by no means confined to Britain but is to be found across many developed countries (Brown, 2011a and b; see also Foskett, 2011 and Hemsley-Brown, 2011).

The basic features of such a system are:

• Universities and colleges are legally autonomous entities with considerable freedom to determine their mission, employ their own staff, etc.

• Market entry barriers are low to enable the entry of new providers (and the exit of existing ones).

• There is significant competition for students, who have a real choice about what, where and how to study.

• Institutions receive all or some of the revenue for teaching in the form of a tuition fee, all or part of which students or graduates have to find from their own or their families’ pockets.

• Institutions compete not only on quality, but also on price.

• Quality assurance is focussed on consumer information and support rather than on quality enhancement.

Students’ teaching and living costs may still be subsidised by the state. University research is usually subsidised, but often through a ‘quasi-market’ where the state acts as monopoly purchaser and allocates funds with varying degrees of selectivity. Other university services may be provided on market or non-market lines. The terms ‘market’, ‘quasi-market’, ‘non-market’ and ‘privatisation’ are all defined in Chapter 2.

In Britain, this process of marketisation may be seen to have commenced with the Thatcher Government's announcement in November 1979 that, from the following academic year, students from overseas would no longer enjoy a fee subsidy. Other major steps included:

• The separation of public funding for teaching and research, and the introduction of selective research funding, from 1986.

• The increase in the level of the still-subsidised Home tuition fee in 1989, and the corresponding reduction in the institutional grant for teaching.

• The introduction of ‘top-up’ loans for student support from 1990.

• The abolition of the ‘binary line’ between universities and polytechnics in 1992.

• The introduction of top-up fees of £1,000 in 1998.

• The changes in the rules for university title in 2004 to enable institutions without research degree-awarding powers to obtain a university title.

• The introduction of ‘variable’ fees of £3,000 in 2006.

A chronology of key events is appended to this chapter.

The book analyses the Coalition Government's reforms and places them in a wider historical and international context. It focusses, in particular, on four major domains or sites of marketisation: the institutional pattern of provision; the funding of research; the funding of student education, both teaching and student support; and quality assurance.¹

Chapter 2 sets out the analytical framework for the study. The two main components are (a) public and private goods and (b) market and non-market modes of production. It begins by reviewing the relevant literature, as well as offering a brief overview of the extent of marketisation amongst developed higher education systems generally.

Chapter 3 gives an account of government-led changes in the institutional pattern of provision between 1979 and 2012. These changes were designed to increase institutional competition for students and research income. Three main sets of developments are identified: a more than doubling in the number of universities; the removal or reduction of external limits on institutional development; and an increase in the number of larger, comprehensive institutions and a reduction in the number of smaller, specialist institutions. The chapter concludes by outlining the Coalition Government's plans for increasing the market participation of FE colleges and private providers, both ‘not for profit’ and ‘for profit’.

Chapter 4 describes how the provision of public funds for research has gradually been placed on a quasi-market basis. This began in earnest with the first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1986 and was refined through successive exercises up to 2008; the next such exercise – the Research Excellence Framework, incorporating some judgement of research impact – will be undertaken in 2014. These exercises, together with their financial implications, are summarised. Chapter 4 also describes, more briefly, the parallel processes for the allocation of research infrastructure funds and public support for graduate research students. It concludes by discussing the concentration of research resources that these policies have produced.

Chapter 5 shows how both the sources and the direction of funds for student (undergraduate) education (teaching, support) gradually changed, so that an increasing proportion of funding was private and/or provided on a competitive basis. It begins with the introduction of full-cost fees for overseas students in 1980, continues with the increase in the subsidised Home/EU fee in 1989, the introduction of top-up fees in 1998, and the introduction of variable fees and income-contingent loans for both fees and maintenance in 2006. It concludes with the replacement of most direct state support for teaching by what is in effect a ‘voucher’ system.² It also describes the parallel changes in student support, beginning with the introduction of loans for maintenance in 1990, and continuing with the abolition and then the reintroduction of maintenance grants in 1998 and 2004. Chapter 5 also gives an account of the diverging policies for funding student education in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland since 2000.

Chapter 6 begins with an account of quality assurance in the then existing separate sectors of higher education in 1979. It tells how a unitary system of quality assurance came to supplement and eventually encompass institutions’ internal quality processes. It traces the evolution of this system from one still essentially based on traditional processes of peer review to one where officially sanctioned consumer market mechanisms – league tables, performance indicators, student satisfaction surveys, published quality information, etc. – are increasingly supplementing, if not yet replacing, conventional academic judgements. It concludes with some reflections on the changes in the structure and governance of quality assurance over the period (see also Brown, submitted for review).

Chapters 7 and 8 offer an assessment of the effects of the policies described in Chapters 3 to 6. Chapter 7 begins by summarising what is known from the literature about the impact of market-based policies in developed higher education systems. It then considers how far what has happened in Britain is consistent with this picture. It looks in turn at efficiency and the use of resources, institutional diversity and stratification, and equity and widening participation. Chapter 8 looks at the impacts on educational and research quality and on the universities’ ability to control the academic ‘agenda’.

Finally, Chapter 9 suggests some of the messages that can be taken from this experience internationally as governments in many countries resort to various forms of marketisation, in order to obtain better value for the enormous public and private resources now invested in universities and colleges. Given the potentially far-reaching nature of the current reforms, this assessment attempts to look forward as well as back. It is necessarily somewhat provisional: it was only during the final drafting that it became known that legislation to implement some of the key elements in the Government's programme would not be introduced in the 2012–13 legislative programme. This has incidentally attracted con...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Everything for Sale?
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors’ introduction
• Foreword by Professor Gareth Williams
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Markets and non-markets
• 3 The institutional pattern of provision
• 4 The funding of research
• 5 The funding of undergraduate education
• 6 Quality assurance
• 7 The impact of marketisation: Efficiency, diversity and equity
• 8 The impact of marketisation: Quality
• 9 Lessons from marketisation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index