The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer

Mike Molesworth, Richard Scullion, Elizabeth Nixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136908453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Until recently government policy in the UK has encouraged an expansion of Higher Education to increase participation and with an express aim of creating a more educated workforce. This expansion has led to competition between Higher Education institutions, with students increasingly positioned as consumers and institutions working to improve the extent to which they meet 'consumer demands'.

Especially given the latest government funding cuts, the most prevalent outlook in Higher Education today is one of business, forcing institutions to reassess the way they are managed and promoted to ensure maximum efficiency, sales and 'profits'. Students view the opportunity to gain a degree as a right, and a service which they have paid for, demanding a greater choice and a return on their investment. Changes in higher education have been rapid, and there has been little critical research into the implications. This volume brings together internationally comparative academic perspectives, critical accounts and empirical research to explore fully the issues and experiences of education as a commodity, examining:

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• the international and financial context of marketisation
• the new purposes of universities
• the implications of university branding and promotion
• league tables and student surveys vs. quality of education
• the higher education market and distance learning
• students as 'active consumers' in the co-creation of value
• changing student experiences, demands and focus.

With contributions from many of the leading names involved in Higher Education including Ron Barnett, Frank Furedi, Lewis Elton, Roger Brown and also Laurie Taylor in his journalistic guise as an academic at the University of Poppleton, this book will be essential reading for many.

Chapter 1
Introduction to the marketisation of higher education and the student as consumer

Frank Furedi

Since the late 1970s the culture of academic life has been transformed by the institutionalisation of the policies of marketisation. At least outwardly universities increasingly ape the managerial models of private and especially public sector corporations. Quaint academic rituals and practices have been gradually displaced by management techniques as departments mutate into cost centres often run by administrators recruited from the private and public sector. Whatever one thinks about the costs and benefits of these changes, marketisation is a reality that academics have to live with. This collection of articles addresses this reality and offers a variety of perspectives on the not-so-quiet managerial revolution in the university.

Advocates of marketisation argue that this process will turn higher education into a more flexible and efficient institution. They claim that the expansion of the market into the lecture hall will provide better value for money and ensure that the university sector will become more efficient and more responsive to the needs of society, the economy, students and parents. The policy-driven term ‘marketisation’ is fundamentally an ideological one and as this collection of articles indicates, its meaning is far from self-evident. As the chapters by Roger Brown and Nick Foskett suggest, marketisation does not necessarily mean or lead to the creation of a market in the sale and purchase of academic education. Indeed it is not always clear what is being bought and sold. So is the student purchasing instruction in an academic discipline or buying a credential necessary for the pursuit of a profession? Or is he or she doing both? It appears that what we have is a highly controlled quasi-market that forces institutions to compete against one another for resources and funding.

In one sense there is very little that is unique about the embrace of competition by higher education. Academia has always been a highly competitive enterprise and since medieval times universities often possessed a profound sense of institutional self-interest and regarded one another with a degree of suspicion. Universities have always competed for resources, and in modern times for research funding. These forms of rivalries have existed in an uneasy relationship with the imperative of academic collaboration. Academics are members of an intellectual community who need to collaborate with another. Yet they are also individuals who are concerned with cultivating their own reputation and are sometimes fiercely aggressive towards each other. However, this form of competition has little to do with the late-twentieth-century market-driven ideology that prevails in higher education. What is new and potentially disturbing about the marketisation of education is the attempt to recast the relationship between academics and students along the model of a service provider and customer.

It is important to understand that marketisation is as much a political/ ideological process as an economic phenomenon. So for example, through the medium of marketisation governments often promote clearly defined political policies. As the chapter by Colin McCaig suggests, marketing has become a vehicle for the promotion of widening participation. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that marketisation is as much about social engineering as economic concerns. In practice, a quasi-market in higher education propped up by state subsidies and micro-managed through government intervention co-exists with genuine market-driven activities. There are of course dimensions of university life that are relatively open to the imperative of the market. The influence of the market mechanism is fairly apparent in the international student bazaar. In this domain there is fierce competition between universities, who with the help of their governments seek to position themselves as global players in a lucrative sphere of economic activity. Universities, particularly those who possess an international reputation for research, also sell patents, provide consultancy and services and launch private companies. Higher education has also become involved with the provision of leisure and conference services and operates in this sphere according to the norms that prevail amongst private sector service providers.

In principle there need not be any objections to universities competing for funds and selling the fruits of their research. It is not this relatively distinct and contained form of economic activity that has led to academic disquiet about the marketisation of education. Often it is the cultural, intellectual and pedagogic consequences of marketisation that represent a cause for concern. From a cultural perspective the project of marketisation represents the attempt to commodify academic education. Specifically it is oriented towards the transformation of what is an abstract, intangible, non-material and relational experience into a visible, quantifiable and instrumentally driven process. The various rituals of commodification, such as quality control, auditing and ranking performance, quantifying the experience of students and constructing league tables, are essentially performative accomplishments. Attempts to endow these rituals with symbolic significance are promoted through the act of branding, mission statements or student surveys. The chapters by Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson, Chris Chapleo and Stella Jones-Devitt and Catherine Samiei offer compelling evidence of these rituals of commodification.

The tendency to commodify higher education does not represent a triumph of free-market economics. Indeed it can be argued that the marketisation of education has been paralleled not by a decrease but an increase in state intervention and the micro-management of university life. The very attempt to regulate economically the provision of academic education is itself a highly politicised activity. Governments are desperately mobilising students and their parents to place universities under market pressure. As the article by Joanna Williams shows, newspapers in England are literally inciting students and their parents to complain and force universities on the defensive. The promotion of student consumer consciousness is not simply motivated by the idealisation of the customer-service-provider model. As customer, the student is expected to serve as the personification of market pressures on an otherwise archaic and unresponsive university. Since according to the logic of marketisation, the customer is always right, the university had better listen to the student. Appeals to the identity of student-as-customer are underpinned by an agenda that seeks to discipline academic life through consumer pressure on higher education. From this perspective the complaining pushy-parent is likely to emerge as the hero in the drama of marketisation.

The culture of complaint has encouraged the emergence of a form of ‘defensive education’ that is devoted to minimising sources of disputes that have the potential to lead to complaint and litigation. Defensive university education encourages a climate where academics are discouraged from exercising their professional judgment when offering feedback or responding to disputed marks. Courses, especially ones that do not rate highly in student surveys, are modified and made customer friendly. Academics have become more defensive and circumspect about expressing their views with clarity. They write formulaic letters of reference and refrain from stating opinions that could provoke complaints from their customers. One of the most obvious strategies for avoiding complaints is to flatter students. Feedback is often used as a vehicle for validating the efforts of a student instead of pointing out weaknesses in presentation and argument.

Sadly many universities have embraced the student-as-customer model. For example the 1994 Group of UK-based universities has adopted the idea that the customer is always right and that flattering them is the way forward. In its statement ‘Enhancing the Student Experience’, the 1994 Group notes that students ‘play an important role as “change agents”, challenging the established modes of learning, and contributing to making it more exciting and relevant’ (2007: 16). The conceptualisation of students as change agents may represent a form of unwitting manipulation of students to act in accordance with the logic of marketisation. However, it is likely that sections of the leadership of higher education have come to internalise the ideology of marketisation to the point where they find it difficult to distinguish between an academic relationship and a commercial transaction. Consequently there is a growing tendency to represent students acting in their role as customers as providing a positive contribution to academic pedagogy.

‘Students know how they want to be taught and have ideas about how techniques can be improved’ is the conclusion drawn by the 1994 Group (2007: 6). Aside from a disturbing tendency to equate academic teaching with a technique, the assimilation of the idea that the customer ‘knows how they want to be taught’ reduces academics to a service provider. As always the commercialisation of education encourages institutions to provide what customers want rather than what they need to become truly educated. This is a problem that philosophers have wrestled with since the beginning of human civilisation.

Socrates revisited

Criticism of the practice of treating students as customers was forcefully pursued by Socrates and Plato in ancient Greece. The principal reason why Socrates was critical of Sophist philosopher teachers was because they charged money for their services. Socrates took the view that payment for teaching compromised the relationship between teacher and student. According to Xenophon, Socrates compared those who peddle their wisdom to those who sell their caresses. Today, such an anti-mercenary stand is likely to strike one as unnecessarily purist and unrealistic. However as J. S. Mill wrote back in 1866, even in an age where the language of cash dominates everyday life there is a lot of sense in Socrates’ concern with the commercialisation of education and relating to students as customers. Mill echoed Socrates’ concern and noted that paid teachers ‘attain their purposes’ not ‘by making people wiser or better, but by conforming to their opinions, pandering to their existing desires, and making them better pleased with themselves and with their errors and vices than they were before’ (Mill 1978: 401).

Mill was writing almost a century and half before the celebration of ‘student satisfaction’ and the ‘student experience’ was integrated into the culture of higher education. But it is unlikely that he could have imagined just how uninhibited the universities’ ‘pandering’ of ‘existing desires’ has become. The current worship of student satisfaction has fostered a climate in which institutions are obsessed with pleasing students and avoiding complaints and fear that disputes with fee-paying customers could lead to litigation. In some cases institutions have adopted practices that border on bribery to get their undergraduates to give the right answers to student satisfaction surveys. There is considerable pressure on academics to put on their customer services hat and do their best not to put students off. Neither Socrates not Mill would have been surprised by the current massaging of examination conventions that aim to avoid customers becoming disappointed by poor results.

From a Socratic perspective the very term ‘student satisfaction’ is an irrational one. Why? Because students need to be placed under intellectual pressure, challenged to experience the intensity of problem solving. Such an engagement does not always promote customer satisfaction. Not a few individuals at the receiving end of a Socratic dialogue felt provoked and angry. Today, this old philosopher would not rank very high in a student satisfaction survey. So the question worth asking is ‘ought the satisfaction of the student customer be one of the central objectives of the university?’ From the perspective of the development of a stimulating and creative academic life, the answer must be a resounding NO! The moment that students begin to regard themselves as customers of academic education, their intellectual development is likely to be compromised. Degrees can be bought; an understanding of a discipline cannot.

Mill took the view that the commercialisation of education threatens the integrity and independence of teachers and academics. In particular he feared that commercial pressures would drive educationalists to accommodate prevailing prejudice and encourage them to subordinate the educational needs of students to the project of attracting potential customers. At one point in his writing, Mill paused and asks what Plato would make of the situation in nineteenth-century England. He imagines Plato saying ‘schoolmasters, and the teachers and governors of universities, must, on every subject on which opinions differ provide the teaching which will be acceptable to those who can give them pupils, not that which is really the best’ (Mill 1978: 402). What Plato is really saying is that once teaching becomes subordinate to an agenda that is external to itself it will become distracted from maintaining its integrity. The pressure to accommodate and compromise will prevail. Today such trends express themselves through grade and degree inflation and the adoption of conservative and instrumentalist skills-based pedagogy. As Socrates and Plato anticipated, the commercialisation of education is driving universities to adopt pedagogic techniques that have little intellectual value. Even the Sophists would be disturbed by an academic culture that is so whole-heartedly devoted to the flattering of students.

In comparison to Athens in the fourth century BC and Victorian England we live in a world where the transformation of the student into a customer has become an accomplished fact. Moreover the tendency to recast an academic relationship into a commercial transaction is no longer represented as the unintended consequence of powerful economic forces but as the explicit objective of higher education entrepreneurs and policy makers. Indeed instead of being embarrassed about treating the academy as a credentials bazaar many universities celebrate their new-found role. On open days, after boasting about their department’s incredibly high RAE ratings, academics compete with one another to assure potential customers that their courses are less demanding than those of rival establishments. In this consumerist climate, no lecturer wants to gain a reputation for being ‘awkward’, ‘demanding’ or a ‘hard marker’. Consequently the culture of positive marking and grade inflation has become a fact of campus life.

Many of the ideas of Socrates and Mill may well be outdated. But tragically their fear that students do not get what is ‘really the best’ when their teachers become peddlers of ideas has proved to be all too true. The idealisation of the role of customer of academic learning conveys the promise of student choice. As Richard Scullion, Mike Molesworth and Elizabeth Nixon indicate in their chapter on this subject the promise of student choice is rarely realised. In the abstract every student can choose to purchase seminar tickets from Trinity College, Cambridge. In reality the exercise of choice is constrained by access to cultural capital and socio-economic realities. Nevertheless the ideology of choice has a powerful influence on shaping students’ identities and works to distract them from realising the potential of their intellectual engagement.

Experience shows that the provision of academic teaching does not fit easily into the paradigm of consumption. It becomes something else if it becomes commodified and bought and sold. Commodification inexorably leads to standardisation, calculation and formulaic teaching. It reduces quality into quantity and transforms an academic relationship between teacher and student into a transaction dominated by concerns that have little to do with education. Thankfully academic and research-based knowledge cannot be standardised and pre-packaged consumer goods, which is why the tension between academic life and marketisation is ultimately irreconcilable. Either academics mutate into the trainers of customers or marketisation works as essentially an ideological or public relations accomplishment. Although the marketisation of education has acquired a formidable influence in Anglo-American universities, its future trajectory is far from clear. This collection of articles provides a unique opportunity to reflect and debate a phenomenon that is likely to exercise a powerful influence on the academy.

Although written from different perspectives this collection of articles shares a common interest in demystifying the workings of the marketisation of higher education. Through their analysis it becomes evident that there is little about this process that we should take as self-evident. Concepts like marketisation, the higher education market, student choice, the branding of universities or the meaning of consumption need to be unpacked and carefully analysed. After reading this collection it is likely that academics will have to start rethinking many of their assumptions about the institutions they inhabit.

Roger Brown’s and Nick Foskett’s chapters on government policy provide excellent overviews of the workings of what is a highly politicised quasi-market in higher education. In different ways the contributions of Ronald Barnett, Paul Gibbs and Lewis Elton are devoted towards an exploration of the potential for a constructive form of accommodation to the marketisation of universities. Barnett is relatively upbeat about this development and takes the view that ‘the presence of the market may lead to a student taking a heightened interest in his or her learning’. The chapters by Morrish and Sauntson, Chapleo and Jones-Devitt and Samiei provide important insights into the workings of the new rituals associated with the market in higher education. McCaig’s analysis of the marketing of wider participation raises questions about its relation to student choice. Through an analysis of the conceptual distinction between consumer, customer and client, Felix Maringe offers a compelling critique of the consumer metaphor. Katherine Nielsen engages with a problem rarely discussed, the tensions raised by the attempt to sell education as a form of authentic (tourist) experience.

The focus of section 3 is the student. Johan Nordensvärd outlines and advocates a citizenship perspective on the status of students and counterposes it to the consumer model. Mike Neary and Andy Hagyard advocate a more radical approach – what they call the pedagogy of excess – towards the transformation of student life. In an important phenomenological study of the management of student desires, Helen Haywood, Rebecca Jenkins and Mike Molesworth look at the way that higher education fuels consumer fantasy. Williams of...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction to the marketisation of higher education and the student as consumer
• Section 1 Marketisation of higher education in context
• Section 2 The marketised higher education institution
• Section 3 Students, consumers and citizens
• Conclusion
• Index