IN a couple of week we are also taking part is a discussion on this topic at  Portcullis House. I think it should be a good debate. Here are details. WE have some spaces left so if anyone wants to take part, contact me.

Potential changes to the funding and structure of the British university system may amount to a repurposing of HE as something more narrowly focused on providing knowledge (in the form of research) and employees (in the form of graduates) for businesses at the expense of other important roles for publicly funded higher-level education. Arguably such changes represent part of an ongoing marketisation of Higher Education in the UK and an accompanying repositioning of students merely as consumers of educational services. Following on from the recent publication of an edited collection that critically examines such issues, this forum will explore the implications of these changes for the sector and its stakeholders. It is hoped that the discussion will highlight and clarify key issues with the ultimate aim of informing future policy.

The session will be hosted by Baroness Morris, former Secretary of State for Education and will take place in the Houses of Parliament on Thursday October 28^th from 5.45 – 7pm. Please arrive promptly for the start of the discussion.

Introductory comments will be made Baroness Morris, and then by academics who have been researching this topic and have contributed to the edited collection, ‘The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer’ (Routledge 2010). This will be followed by an open discussion.

In the mean time, it’s interesting to see the role education is playing in the election. We’ll try to get back into the habit of posting relevant information on the blog as campaigns and policies continue to develop.

This seems to be widely reported. I think it is the clearest statement yet about the preferred policy direction for higher education.  Our book is important and timely. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8322627.stm

I have a seven-year old. He wants to be an engineer, racing driver, spaceman, artist, pilot, builder, cook, carpenter or any number of other things depending on what he is playing at the time. Mostly though, he really isn’t thinking about a career. Do we really have to start getting him to think seriously about this at the age of seven? And should we really be thinking of making careers a priority for children this young? 

The marketing department of universities with vocational courses will no doubt welcome the boost to their message, But if this takes off it has the potential to further reduce what we mean by education,  narrowing what it does to preparation for a job. We seem to confuse providing children with choice and a range of experiences with job choice and work experiences.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8316658.stm

I think what I find most frustrating about this is the lack of clarity about what we mean by consumers in this context. Consumer researchers like Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang (authors of ‘The Unmanageable Consumer’), or Colin Campbell (who writes about ‘craft consumption’), and many other consumer researchers, note that the consumer can wear many masks. Rather than simply restate the power of the sovereign consumer-chooser, we need to better understand what type of consumer students might become. This task might also warn that there are significant limitations in a model of HE where quality is based on consumer behaviour. At the very least we might work towards models of the consumer that are consistent with ‘good education’. 

But we also need to think about the relationship between marketisation and ‘good education’. Mandelson comments on the role of trade bodies ensuring quality and on the need for ‘comercialisation of teaching and research’. It feels as if the argument is over because it is ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’ that value and quality can only be driven by marketisation. Yet the very disciplines that study these things (marketing and consumer behaviour) are full of complex arguments that question such assumptions. Do we have quality in financial markets? In the car market?  In the fast food market? In clothes retail? Which of these qualities might best suit education?

The worrying thing is the justification. This is the need to be ‘on brand’ and to ‘give a certain impression’. Dress code is just part of that broader project to restrict our activities to only those things that correctly reproduce a carefully managed corporate image. This makes all the work of the academic subject to the desires of the corporate communications department who want only to maximise profit via customer satisfaction. We are asked to wear certain clothes to justify student fees, for example, because the customer expects to be taught by professionals and a suit is an easy way to create that image.

We might expect more of this sort of thing.

Book Proposal (edited collection): The Marketisation of UK Higher Education and the Student as Consumer

Dr Mike Molesworth, Lizzie Nixon & Richard Scullion 

1. Rationale

Recent British government policy has been to expand Higher Education (HE) with the aim of increasing participation and therefore provide a more educated workforce capable of competing in modern ‘knowledge-based’ economies. As a result we have seen more ‘market-led’ approaches to Higher Education. We are perhaps approaching something like a free market where there is competition amongst HEIs to reduce costs and where aims to ‘improve’ higher education are based on consumer demands in line with a broader consumer culture. Once a university might have reflected critically on the business style of doing things beyond the campus; today the business mind-set is on the campus and increasingly in charge. A ‘market-led’ university may respond to consumer calls by focusing on the content students’ desire at a market rate. It may decrease intellectual complexity, if this is not in demand and profitable, and may instead focus on connections with the workplace. The result is that as the sector is transformed, so too are the ways in which universities are managed and therefore also the priorities and daily routines of staff. University management may deploy a previously alien range of management approaches and structures to ensure maximum efficiency, maximum sales and maximum profits. The expansion of HE has created a ‘market’ that also challenges wider beliefs about the purpose of higher education. Academics note how some students now believe that a degree (not just access to HE) is their ‘right’ because they have paid for it, and that they should have the degree of their choice in order to get the job they want on graduation. For many students a degree has come to be seen as primarily the purchase of a service that provides a rite of passage into a more privileged place within a consumer society. In this edited collection we aim to critically examine these changes and offer a range of views on the implications for the sector, for institutional management, and for individual tutors and students with a view to offering some ways forward.

The marketization of UK higher education is new and has ‘crept up’ on us. Fuelled by the introduction of top-up fees following the Higher Education Act 2004, there has been frequent commentary in the media (and especially in Times Higher Education, Guardian Education and BBC Education) and a growing number of published journal articles exploring the impact of the market, yet there is little academic work that draws the multitude of issues and experiences together. As such we believe there is demand for an edited collection that collates a wide range of academic perspectives, critical accounts, and original empirical work on the topic emerging from several UK HEIs. This would be the first edited collection of this kind, and we hope, a focal point for future debate in the area. The encouraging review of our recent journal article on the marketisation of HE in Times Higher Education, shows that interest and debate in this area is continuing. We believe that the proposed book will be of interest to many working in UK HE, to students on academic practice MAs and EdDs, and for HEI managers and marketers. We also think that this significant review of UK HE will be interesting for an international audience (especially as pressures to marketise HE are global) as a point of comparison and as a critical account of the impact of UK government policy of HE. We also see the book as a must-read for those advising students at secondary or tertiary levels and potentially for any students seeking to better understand their own University experience. Our hope with this project is also to encourage reflection in academic tutors and in HE managers and policy makers and to offer ideas for the future directions of UK HE.

We have invited contributions for an edited collection that critically assesses the marketization of UK higher education and of the emerging conceptualisation of the student as a consumer. In response we had 36 expressions of interest and from these we have selected a total of 19 extended abstracts (summarised below) as a basis for chapters to be included in the book. We have also put in place a peer and editorial team review process to ensure that the final work meets rigorous standards.  We are aiming for each chapter to be approximately 6000 words or under and for the book to be approximately 100k words in total (accepting that not all proposed chapters will materialise and/or get through the review process). We have set October 2009 as a deadline for full draft chapters and January 2010 for finished chapters following the review process. Shortly after this we would expect to have a full typescript of the book.

2. Structure and Chapter Overview

2. 1. Structure

Introduction – Frank Furedi

Section 1 – Higher Education Marketisation in context

The March of the Market

The marketised university: defending the indefensible

Globalisation, entrepreneurship and empowerment: How university mission statements promise the world

Government Policy and The Funding of Higher education

Liquefied or blended: universities for the 21st Century

The Entrapment of Higher Education by Consumer Time

Section 2 – Managing the Marketised University

Collegiality, Creativity, Complexity: A Humboldtian approach to Universities

Branding a University: adding real value or smoke and mirrors?

‘Packaged learning’ and ‘Bums on Seats’? Examining the higher education market in distance learning

From Accrington Stanley to academia? The use of league tables and student surveys to determine ‘quality’ in higher education

You can lead a horse to water… students as active consumers in the co-creation of value: a service-dominant logic approach to the management of higher education

The student as consumer: affordances and constraints in a transforming HE environment

Section 3 – Lecturers, students, producers and consumers

Constructing consumption: what media representations reveal about today’s students

Student choice in a vocational university: how choice can create conservative learners

‘This place is not at all what I expected’: Student Demand for Authentic Irish Studies Programmes in Ireland

Students as managers, consumers and commodities: education within a neo-liberal world order

Higher Education as the management of consumer desires

Marketisation of Higher Education through the lens of ‘career’

Research Based Learning – changing the student role: from consumers to contributors

Conclusions

Implications of the Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer

Final words from the University of Poppleton – Laurie Taylor

2. 2. Chapter Overviews

Introduction 

Professor Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent

This chapter will provide an introduction to the book and to each of the main sections.

Section 1 – Higher Education Marketisation in context

This section covers broader issues of policy, funding, globalisation, historical accounts and debates about market ideology. Chapters here deal with the sector as a whole or with key concepts.

The March of the Market

It appears that everywhere there is a trend towards marketisation (Williams, 1995), the application of the economic theory of markets to the provision of student education. Higher education systems are being liberalised, with private “for profit” providers joining and competing with publicly funded institutions. Tuition fees are being introduced or raised so that students and their families are bearing an increasing share of the costs of teaching. Maintenance grants are being supplemented with, or replaced by, loans. Institutional rankings and other guides to consumer choice are proliferating whilst institutions are devoting increasing resources and energy to marketing and branding. In short, the market is coming to dominate what Burton Clark many years ago termed the “triangle of coordination” (Clark, 1983), at the expense of the academy and the state.

This chapter defines what is meant by the marketisation of student education and considers how far a number of major systems reflect its characteristics.

In economic theory, a market is a form of social coordination where the demand and supply of a product or service are balanced through the price mechanism. Consumers choose between the alternatives on offer on the basis of suitability for them (price, quality, availability). No major higher education system exhibits the characteristics of an economic market for a variety of reasons well established in the literature (see for example, Massy, 2004), the main one being the public goods aspects. Nevertheless there is a general trend towards providing student education as if it were a tradeable commodity. The following are suggested as the main indicators of the extent to which any individual higher education system exhibits market-like features:

1.The amount of competition between providers; within this, the extent of competition from private and especially “for profit” institutions and organisations; 2.The amount of choice between providers on the part of students, families and funders; linked to this, the amount of accessible information to guide that choice; 3.The proportion of the cost of teaching that is met privately, through tuition fees; 4.The extent and purposes of market regulation.

Bearing this in mind, the main HE systems can be divided into two broad groups:

1.Those with a substantial degree of marketisation; 2.Those where marketisation has still to develop.

The former includes the major Anglophone systems (the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada) and also Japan, Korea, The Netherlands and Chile. All of these exhibit a significant amount of private investment, if not competition. The latter comprises most of the continental European countries. Here fees are low or non-existent and there are relatively high levels of public investment and public provision. The chapter will describe the evolution of markets in the first group and the pressures to marketise in the second.

The marketized university: defending the indefensible                 

The marketized university polarises opinion.  There are those who consider that the contemporary university has to recognize that it is placed in a competitive marketplace and that the only route for its survival is to compete by marketing itself and its products and activities.  After all, state funding for higher education is bound to fall short of a university’s needs and so marketing is necessary for income generation.  This camp is divided between those who believe in the virtues of the market per se and those who consider that, irrespective of ideology, de facto the university finds itself in a competitive market-place: either way, market disciplines are urged on the university.

On the other hand, there are those who consider that the shift towards the marketized university is having a deleterious impact on the university.  Here, there are those who are prompted by a concern with the student experience and the claimed effect on the pedagogical relationship wrought by the higher education market (as students become ‘customers’).  Here, too, are those who are concerned about the university as a social institution, for they consider that marketization is corrupting the university as an embodiment of public goods. 

Noticeable in this polarisation of views is a particular similarity.  Characteristically, all these views call upon empirical evidence – to demonstrate the contemporary marketization of the university – but all have a valuing of the market as such as a source of their urgings.  Their valuings differ markedly, exhibiting both positive and hostile value positions; but such value positions are uniformly present.  It can be said, therefore, that we are here in the presence of an ideological field with interests – in favour of or antagonistic towards the market – being dressed up as rational viewpoints.  Positions are taken in relation to the market – positive or negative – and then evidence is sought to bolster the view in question.

In this context, is there a way through that will allow a less value-driven view to be developed?  Is the market – which for many is indefensible – defensible?  Is there something intrinsically or logically problematic with the marketization of higher education?  Alternatively, are there elements of markets that might prove advantageous for the development of higher education and the university?  Might there just be available a position that offers a reconciliation of the polarised positions? 

Globalisation, entrepreneurship and empowerment: How university mission statements promise the world

Over the last decade across the HE sector in the UK we have seen the privatization and commodification of staff and student services within institutions. Most apparent to those who work within the academy has been the emergence of a neoliberal governmentality in university management that appears to place economic rationalism at the core of its operating philosophy. Departments have been replaced by ‘cost centres’ which are headed by ‘team leaders’ whose duties resemble those of accountants rather than academics. Financial controllers have superseded academics in decision-making even at faculty level. One of the most profound changes has been in the relationship between students and the HEI, and between students and academic staff teaching them. At the same time as the public face of the university prefers to portray students as consumers who employ ‘choice’, these same students are now positioned as units of profit, as new opportunities for stripping students of their cash have been seized. For example, student halls of residence have been sold off, or ‘student villages’ have been built by Private Finance Initiative and rented to students for profit. Universities routinely charge for ‘membership’ of sports facilities, and privatised food courts have appeared to replace refectories and cafeterias. Graduation is no longer an austere academic rite of passage, but is as garlanded as a celebrity wedding.

This chapter examines the impact of neoliberal discourses on the marketization of universities in the UK. In particular, we will present the results of a detailed corpus linguistic analysis of all of the available mission statements for UK universities in the Russell Group; 1994 Group and Million + group. We hope to show the ways in which the dichotomy of the HEI-student relationship is masked by neoliberal discourses of choice and freedom.

Government Policy and the Funding of Higher Education

This chapter will examine the role of government policy in making and shaping the higher education market place in the UK. The pursuit of markets as the main driver of public sector provision is traditionally attributed to the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, elected in 1979. Market mechanisms (Friedman, 1962; von Hayek 1976) were seen to stimulate quality improvements, raise standards of achievement, enhance the libertarian values of ‘choice’, and drive down unit costs, which would enable governments to grow the education sector without a proportional increase in public expenditure.

Government policy has sought to intervene in the choice process through two strategies. The first of these (Funding Council funding) is a mechanism used strongly by government to shape the detail of the market by providing additional or less funding for particular types of programme or discipline, for example in its prioritisation of funding for Foundation Degrees. The second element (student fees) has been a market mechanism introduced in the UK since 2000. Student fees, whatever their level, provide a simple market mechanism which means that ‘more students = more income’. Although the Higher Education Act of 2003 introduced the idea of variable fees as a market mechanism, the imposition of a fee cap maximum has meant that for almost all universities, they have not yet become a price differentiation mechanism in the market. However, the prospect of raising the cap from its current level of c£3000 to a higher figure, or of removing it altogether, has emerged as a review of fees is to be undertaken in 2010/11.

This chapter will examine each of these issues in detail and provide a prospective view of how government policy will interact with marketisation and HE in the second decade of the 21st century.

Liquefied or blended; universities for the 21st Century

The debate concerning ‘students as consumers’ tends to assume that there is little question that students are in fact ‘being consumers’ when it comes to their engagement in higher education. Further, there is a set of assumptions that this reflects the changing nature of higher education and government policy. Bauman (2000) offers an alternative conceptualisation, grounded in his account of ‘liquid modernity’ that makes sense of the experiences of students and tutors. For Bauman we are, in a raft of areas of our lives, informed by the ‘script of shopping’:

‘Whatever we do and whatever name we attach to our activity is a kind of shopping. An activity shaped in the likeness of shopping. The code in which our ‘life policy’ is scripted is derived from the pragmatics of shopping’ (Bauman, 2000:73-4).

For Bauman, however, this is only part of the story. Acting as a consumer works as an analgesic for the essential bleakness of modern life. Bauman’s account of such consumer-like behaviour is grounded in a deeper dilemma embedded in the human condition of the 21st century. A world in which the individual is required to act independently and autonomously, and yet a world in which the individual finds it impossible to find the resources to act in such a way, the gulf, as Bauman puts it, ‘…between individuality de jure and de facto’ (see Bauman, 2000: 49). A gap between ‘legally enforced freedom’ and ‘the genuine potency of self-assertion’.

This dilemma gives rise to a number of issues that underpin human agency and are significant in our understanding of higher education. In particular:

A. A decline in institutions as meaning generating social objects

B. A disposition towards ‘praxeomorphic thinking’

C. A resistance to the role of ‘authorities’

In conclusion, I set out to develop an account of higher education that reflects this culture of liquid modernity in terms that resonate with the lives of students and potential students. Finally, I return to Bauman’s central dilemma of freedom. HEIs may have a role in responding to this gulf between de facto and de jure individuality, but they also have a role in providing an educational experience that begins ‘where students are’. This tension may be one that has to be lived and re-lived rather than resolved.

The Entrapment of Higher Education by Consumer Time

This discussion is set against increasing corporate, consumerist and government inroads into the realm of education and demanding that ‘education serve the dictates of the marketplace and its demand for economic growth, [and] through the inroads of advertising and marketing’ (Norris, 2006: 459/460). This creates what Young (2002) considers to be the bureaucratic and machine-like modern university in which it is no longer customary to find teachers and students but ‘suppliers’ and ‘consumers’, with all that this entails. More specifically it nurtures an ideology of consumerism where the meaning of life is to be found in the buying of things and pre-packaged experiences.  For academics and for students this may create anxiety and alienation over what they take students to be and what they take themselves to be. In this unthinking packing of activities in time, what is lost is the time to think.

Time and temporality have received little attention in the consumerism, marketing or, until recently, higher education literature. This paper attempts to compare the notions of timing implicit in education as paideia (transitional personal growth) with that implicit in consumerism and the marketing practices which foster it. It suggests that the consumerist notion of time can change what higher education might be through how individuals understand their temporal being. In my conceptual discussion I challenge higher education to resist its being temporalised by consumerism. Barnett (2007) has suggested that for students and academics alike there has been a transition from a time when both past and future were experiences within the being of the present, to one where temporality has become disintegrated and a linear sense of time predominates.

Section 2 – Managing the Marketised University

This section covers institutional level debates relating to branding, approaches to management, design of courses, or how institutions are changing.

Collegiality, Creativity, Complexity: A Humboldtian approach to Universities

It is getting more and more common to treat universities as just another form of business. Not only does this ignore the general finding that none of the professions should be managed (Handy 1984), but that the “leadership function has to be carried out by senior professionals – to hand it over to an outsider would be an abrogation of their responsibilities. The administrative function, on the other hand, can be delegated to outsiders or to junior professionals because it is under the direction of professionals. . .Professional institutions are different from business organizations because they are still, at heart, colleges of autonomous licensed individuals, not hired hands.” The Report of the Jarratt Committee, set up by the Committee of ViceChancellors and Principals in 1985, correctly criticised universities for not being sufficiently “business like”, but then confused the matter by looking for a remedy in their being “more like business”. This confusion has been with us ever since.

Recent research on academic leadership (Gill 2007) ignores two fundamental differences between universities and business  – in universities the prime motivating factor is not financial success but excellence, and the success of a university is measured in decades rather than years. Detailed long term planning is difficult, if not impossible; as recognised by Birnbaum (1988) in his ‘cybernetic model’, in which stability and change depend not “on an omniscient and rational agent but on spontaneous corrective action”.

How might a Vice-Chancellor today return to such a form of governance? As there cannot be any research evidence as yet, this is a time for tentative predictions. If universities are to aim at excellence, it is they who must be responsible for achieving it and not some external body that assures quality. This conclusion was expressed perhaps most clearly by Pirsig (1977), who traced it back to the ancient Greek concept of  aretê – duty to oneself. It is this which assures excellence in research, and not the criteria established by the research assessment exercise. Nothing – until recently – has existed in the second main activity of academics, teaching, but the development of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Elton 2009) is beginning to change that. The work of the Quality Assurance Agency is completely irrelevant – it has not even been able to notice that the average quality, which it measures, is an average over individuals, whose quality varies hugely (Tobin 1995).                

The successful future of universities can and should be based on the three C’s. Regrettably we are instead faced with the MMP – Managerialism, Mediocrity and Predictability. In such a climate, universities cannot thrive. However, universities will survive, most probably in China.

What is needed is change – and in some instances quite radical change, but within the compass of the three C’s. – collegiality, creativity and complexity, and that each of them is harmed by gross and direct external interference and by the associated top-down managerialism.

Branding a university: adding real value or ‘smoke and mirrors’?

In recent years UK universities have increasingly sought to differentiate from one another, often utilising the practice and techniques of branding and, controversially, expending considerable sums in doing so. The effectiveness of branding activity in UK Higher Education (HE) has traditionally received limited scrutiny among academics and although this is changing to some extent, there is little evidence of much debate on both the case for and against branding activity, and the applicability of commercial approaches often applied. This paper seeks to take initial steps to remedy that situation, examining the rationale for branding as part of the ‘marketisation’ of UK higher education, and considering whether the outcomes of such branding activity can be justified.  This was undertaken through qualitative research among UK university senior management, viewed in conjunction with the current literature on the subject of branding in higher education.

Findings and conclusions were that, whilst branding is generally supported by university management, the rationale for branding activity varied greatly. Although the role of branding as part of the marketisation of UK higher education is contentious, and simple application of commercial techniques may be difficult, to view it simply in these terms ignores a number of benefits that an understanding of brand can offer in defining and communicating the essence of the institution. If branding techniques are applied in a manner that is sensitive to the particular qualities of higher education it can support rather than be detrimental to the varied and complex role of universities. To do this, however, requires a specific approach to branding that is seemingly only partially embraced.

‘Packaged Learning’ and ‘Bums on Seats’?: Examining the higher education market in distance learning

Distance learning (DL) is one of the most consumer-led and market-driven areas of higher education, involving heavy upfront investment and a network of agents across the world. Thus, such programmes have to respond to the demand of potential learners and their employers (Raddon 2007). This chapter examines a large DL postgraduate programme aimed at human resource professionals. An overview is provided of how this programme has evolved over the last 18 years within an entrepreneurial department. The programme examined here has long been subject to the economic market pressures that are now starting to impact on higher education more widely, e.g. cost effectiveness, value for money, meeting consumer demand and providing skills for work. This leads me to consider the programme from two perspectives – that of learners and that of myself as an academic. In particular, I seek to unpick some of the tensions that exist around what is both a marketised form of education and one that opens up great opportunities to adult learners.

Drawing on a survey and in-depth interviews with learners, I explore the way in which this programme is often framed by respondents as a “packaged learning” experience, chosen as a course that meets work-related needs, and fits in with learners’ lives. Aspects of the programme, such as all material arriving in a box by post appear to heighten the sense of consuming a ‘packaged learning’ experience and increase credentialism and the idea of having an education rather than being a learner (Molesworth, Nixon, & Scullion 2009). Nevertheless, alongside this more marketised view are stories of the broader value that this course has to learners.

From the tutor perspective, it can be a challenge to ensure that learners engage fully with the most demanding learning materials when as a ‘discerning customer’ they can pick and choose what they read.

Financial pressures in higher education mean that universities are now constantly seeking new income streams (Williams, 2007), with DL development being one such stream. Working in a self-financing DL department presents a variety of tensions (e.g. heavy focus on administration, student recruitment and marketing, economically viable course development).

Distance learning has tended to be characterised as the most industrialised form of HE connected to capitalist forms of production, consumerism and consumption (Peters, 2001), and a discourse of delivery over content and system over learner (Sumner, 2000). Moreover, engaging in practices such as course marketing, branding, promotion, recruitment, market research and employer engagement can be alien – and alienating – for academics (Molesworth, et al., 2009). Indeed, there is the ‘hard truth’ that a DL course has to cover costs and it has to get ‘bums on seats’ to meet university targets. There is a strong need to respond to consumer demand and the market, driving practices that may not be traditionally linked to the academic role. On the other hand, distance learning can provide a crucial means of accessing HE and a life changing experience for adult learners. Thus, responding to the market is not necessarily a negative or unworthy activity for higher education, provided we are working to ensure that learning is both work-relevant and intellectually and personally challenging and fulfilling for learners and academics alike.

From Accrington Stanley to academia? The use of league tables and student surveys to determine ‘quality’ in Higher Education

This chapter will explore the assumptions underpinning the use of league tables – originally used to determine competitive sports outcomes but increasingly used as a key arbiter of quality in Higher Education. These league tables and surveys are based on a neo-liberal agenda which within Higher Education has increasingly gathered momentum. In this chapter we will use the presuppositions identified by Olssen and Peters (2005) to take neo-liberal ideology to a ‘logical’ conclusion. We will outline a set of characteristics that can be applied to curricula, policy and practice that empower the consumer voice in Higher Education as articulated by neoliberal values. Firstly, promoting the concept of global choice for individuals, organisations and multinational corporations – Inherent in this statement is a commitment to free trade, eschewing subsidies and other forms of state imposed protection or support. This would remove any HEFCE subsidies for individuals, which in neo-liberal terms, limit choice and would liberate many organisations and corporations to offer bespoke Higher Education linked to economic ambitions and relevant skills acquisition. Privileging individualism – This value celebrates the primacy of the individual by assuming that economically-responsible individuals are the best judges of their own interests and needs. Escalating regulation, audit and public accountability – This includes a redefinition of the ‘academic’ as an approved professional. Minimising the role played by the State in everyday life – This implies that the market is a self-regulating force beyond compare. The relative merits of adopting this approach will then be left for the reader to determine. The aim of the chapter is to adopt a polemic approach to enable a detailed exploration of the logic and possible outcomes when imposing explicit and implicit values of neo-liberalism on Higher Education.

You can lead a horse to water… students as active consumers in the co-creation of value: a service-dominant logic approach to the management of higher education

Current government policy is driving British universities towards a market-led, competition-based model of higher education, promoting the role of student demand in driving up the quality of teaching and learning services.  Whilst this policy has been widely adopted by higher education managers in the UK and elsewhere, the notion of `student as customer’ has drawn vehement criticism from the academic community.  This paper attempts to address these criticisms by proposing a broadened conception of the role of customers in the consumption process, based on theoretical developments in the services marketing literature.

Current quality management systems in UK universities are based on the principles of Total Quality Management (TQM), adopting a goods-dominant logic in which customers are assumed to be passive recipients of value-laden products.  This logic implies that quality and value can be embedded into higher education `products’ through the design of course materials and quality management systems. This logic marginalises the role of the consumption process in value creation.  In contrast, the service-dominant logic (SDL) asserts that value is jointly created through a consumption process that integrates inputs from both the university and its students. University inputs such as course design, learning materials etc. have no intrinsic value, but instead offer value potential which is realised (or not) through the co-creation process.  Students, therefore, play an active role in determining the extent of the value that they derive from the higher education service.  The extent of their emotional and behavioural engagement in the learning process is therefore of central importance to the realisation of a university’s value proposition.

The proposed model is tested through a survey of 420 students from eight UK universities.  The results provide strong support for the model, in which students’ beliefs about quality combine with affective and conative components to form an overall attitude towards the higher education service. The theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed. Acceptance of a service-dominant logic implies a fundamental shift in the focus of quality management systems in higher education. Whereas current approaches emphasise mechanistic aspects of course design and quality management systems, it is argued that greater attention should be paid to inputs and processes that facilitate students’ emotional and behavioural engagement.

The student as consumer: affordances and constraints in a transforming HE environment

Consumerism is the central tenet of the free market (Ayal et al. 1997) in which business success depends almost entirely on satisfying customer needs and exceeding their expectations. From its original roots in service and vocation, Higher Education (HE) has transformed, along with other organisations in society, into enterprises with a business mission and a keen eye on the bottom line. As massification replaced elitism in HE, the need for shedding off the ivory tower image and transforming universities into responsive real-world oriented organisations grew. Branding and marketing, advertising and selling, competition and profit generation, product focus and development are the defining discourses of the new corporate university in which the student has become a consumer.

This paper attempts to discuss the implications and limitations of adopting the consumer metaphor in HE. It looks specifically at how the consumer metaphor has transformed HE teaching and how the non-profit service oriented mission of the university has metamorphosed into a business focused and enterprise driven organisation. Using Cheney et al. (1997) propositions against consumerism in HE and empirical evidence from our own research, the paper will discuss whether or not: the consumer metaphor distances students from or integrates them more strongly with the educational process; the focus on consumer satisfaction and its measurement enhances or diminishes quality of the educational experience, and the consumer metaphor supports or undermines traditional HE values for learning.

The paper utilises evidence from multiple sources including my PhD thesis, research on HE marketing and evidence from a survey of the impact of globalisation in HE conducted at the University of Southampton.

The paper concludes that the real consumer in HE is not the student but the external world which universities should and cannot ignore in their transformation processes. On the contrary, students wear multiple hats in the educational transformation processes and the use of the consumer metaphor should therefore not be applied wholesale and blindly to every encounter in this transformative process.

Section 3 – Lecturers, students, producers and consumers

This section deals with discussions about how students are seen, or see themselves, with their approaches to HE, with tutor identities, and with implications for learning and teaching.

Constructing consumption: what media representations reveal about today’s students

The introduction of directly-paid tuition fees in 2001 placed students in the role of consumers of higher education (HE).  However, it remains the case that a majority of students at English universities take no direct part in any payment process as fees will be paid directly by government loans, or are covered by bursaries, or paid on their behalf by parents.  A financial transaction alone need not necessarily result in students becoming consumers of a HE product (Grayling: 3/11/02), yet a new ‘student-consumer’ has been indentified whose mentality is also constructed by other government policies (Leathwood and O’Connell: 2003; Slowey: 2003), the media, universities and fellow students.

This chapter focuses on an analysis of popular constructions of student-consumers as represented in the mainstream print media since 2000. The positioning of students as consumers is (re)presented in the popular media which then (re)constructs the student-consumer for a new generation.  Articles were selected which made explicit reference to students as consumers of HE, and cover opinion pieces and reported news articles.  Techniques associated with critical discourse analysis (Scott, 1990; Fairclough, 2003) reveal four emerging themes: the role of parents as ‘co-consumers’ of HE; the importance of student-consumers gaining ‘value-for-money’; the rise of students complaining, or seeking legal redress and finally, the relationship of student-consumers to broader society. 

There are no references to parents being the consumers of HE prior to 2007 and yet such articles have since flourished.  The Daily Mail in particular plays to the concerns of its readership in writing that “Parents, particularly those from middle-class backgrounds, are behaving more and more like consumers: they pay the money, they expect to see results,” (Smith-Squire, 17/01/08).  Similar references to parents as consumers are made in The Guardian.  The construction of the parent as co-consumer allows for more legitimate interference in the lives of youngsters who may have previously been considered adult and independent after leaving home to go to university.  Although ridiculed as “the curse of the helicopter mother” (Daily Mail, 17/01/08 and Sunday Times 24/08/08) changes such as giving parents the right to manage UCAS applications reinforces the legitimacy of the parent as co-consumer and risks infantilising students. 

The desire to gain ‘value for money’ becomes a concern for whole families (Daily Mail, 24/09/07, The Guardian, 20/02/07) leading to students taking on board an increasingly instrumental focus upon gaining skills for employability. This constructs today’s students as different from those of a previous generation through a strategic focus upon the acquisition of the university’s product.  Students are presented as empowered by their consumer status. However, the nature of complaints most students are portrayed as making represents a limited range of demands.  Being a consumer allows students to complain about things which are of direct relevance to the service they expected to receive.  Students are rarely portrayed as involved with wider political issues.  Student-consumers are not constructed as agents of change except within the limited confines of their own university and are represented as quite passive in relation to broader social issues.  The political challenge yesterday’s students may have provided to the establishment is reduced to the exercising of consumer choice and managed through individual universities’ support services, (Barnes, 2001; Slowey, 2003).

Student choice in a vocational university: how choice can create conservative learners

This chapter explores the practices and lived experiences of educational choice, in assessment, subject content, pathways and placements drawing from a dataset involving 60 phenomenological interviews with students from a vocationally-oriented British university.

The ideology of consumer society privileges the individual with free choice. In the Western world, we use autonomous choice as the mechanism to determine our own lifestyle through interaction with the marketplace. The assumption that ‘choice is good’ is largely unquestioned in our society and in order to resist divorcing Higher Education (HE) from the context within which it is seated, we consider the role of choice in education by drawing on our understanding of consumer culture. In accordance with this, we build on the notion that an increasingly marketised HE system is encouraging students to behave as customers. We recognise that much educational literature supports offering choice to learners on the grounds that it is pedagogically effective, either through increased motivation (Biggs 2003), greater engagement and ownership of work (Barnett and Hallam 1991) or by encouraging deep approaches to learning (Ramsden 1991). However, we suggest that the outcome of a consumer framing of choice is a conservative approach to their learning.

The stories we present in this paper are those of second and third year undergraduate students (with each degree course running for three years). Our focus here is on the commonalities of students’ experiences of in-course choice to provide a greater understanding of this process, although we do note some interesting consequences of the different operationalisation of choice in the structure of the four degree programmes represented in this study.

The findings of this research suggests that choice does little to move students closer to autonomous, critical thinking individuals. Choice was not used to expand identity but appeared to encourage students to reduce their future selves to job specialisms, justified by the possibility of enhanced future consumer choice. Our understanding of student behaviour from this study suggests that choice is not experienced as an opportunity for transformational learning but continues to drive the discourse of consumption and further embed students into a competitive economy. In order to make sense of these themes, we contextualise our findings in relation to current understandings of choice as part of the student’s broader life world, as well as its role in UK HE and as the foundation of a consumer society. We draw on theories of self-identity (including Giddens 1991 and Gabriel and Lang 2006) in which to seat our analysis and to explore how students create current and future selves through the choice we offer. By considering the consequences, we are able to reconsider the purpose of offering choice in HE.

‘This place is not at all what I had expected’: Student Demand for Authentic Irish Studies Programmes in Ireland

Student consumption of international education has been characterised as purposeful movement in order to gain academic experience.  Baiba Rivza and Ulrich Teichler suggest that the goals of this mobility include: gaining access to educational opportunities unavailable at home, gaining enculturation experiences, and temporary mobility (2007: 458).  While all three of the types of mobility are present in Ireland, how students choose them, and indeed how they consume these experiences is under-researched.  

Woolf notes that growth in the summer term abroad industry has blurred ‘the distinction between education abroad and educational tourism’ as students plan their own activities prior to and upon completion of their programmes (2007: 503).  As competition and participation has grown, new programmes have been designed to attract new and diverse types of students.  Using data from ethnographic fieldwork in Belfast (UK) and Limerick (ROI) between 2007 and 2009, international education is conceived of not as the consumption of curricula, but instead the consumption of place, including both academic products created by a higher education institution and touristic experiences created for themselves.  This paper will examine how Irish Studies programmes are designed and advertised, the consumption patterns of different types of student learners, and the impact this has on the delivery of international education products.

Summer school programmes have embraced marketing models in order to maximise enrolment.  For example, summer schools are participating in larger, institutional level activities which effectively ‘turn students into consumers, and educators into service providers, in order that they market might work its wonders’ (Gibbs 2001: 87).  Sophisticated advertising campaigns are developed in order to lure these new consumer students away from competitors, and often use a unique feature of the locality, such as violence or cultural authenticity, of the institution as a hook to attract students each year.  The learner identities of students participating in these programmes are pivotal in understanding both student motivations and institutional responses to these motivations.  Fieldwork has shown that networks of association, however, are very influential in developing this network of exchange, be it through faculty exchanges or word of mouth between students.  Many of these students do not have the choice of educational opportunities discussed by Clarke (2007) because they are restricted by these exchange agreements.  

Students as managers, consumers and commodities: education within a neo-liberal world order

This chapter considers the changing role of students and education within a global, neo-liberal framework. To explain these changes, this study uses Simon and Masschelein’s theories of governmentalization of education/educationalization of society (2008). Education was considered to have a social dimension and education was used as governmental intervention in social, cultural or economic concerns. The state translates societal problems like inequality and workforce needs into educational solutions within school reforms and curriculum reforms. According to Simon and Masschelein, there has been a transition from social governance to economic governance. The rationality of change is based on an economization of the social.

Within this change of rationality the roles of students and the role of education have changed. Students have become managers, consumers and commodities. This paper argues that we can not talk about one role of education or student but rather an amount of ambiguous and conflicting roles that partly contradict each other. To analyse these changes the paper aims to examine the meta-narratives of contemporary education and to understand how this links to the concept narratives of students and universities. The study is based on using metaphors and narratives as defined self-supporting poetics for contemporary science (compare with Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2003).

The chapter uses narrative theory as used by Somners (1994) focusing on meta- narratives and concept narratives. The former can be seen as epic stories that frame the different epochs and concept narratives as “concepts and explanations that we construct as social researchers” which could include factors like social forces (market patterns, institutional practices, organizational constraints). (Somners, 1994:619). Metaphors and narratives as analytical tools help us categorize and analyze the divergent and conflicting roles of students and universities in the contemporary UK.

The conclusion of the paper is that the roles of education for students are colliding, not only because students are managers, consumers and commodities at the same time, but also since prior roles have survived within the social and discursive practices of education (enlightenment, paternalism, social citizenship). Roles of students and education are not simply replaced; instead the different and conflicting roles of students and education can co-exist with more or less friction.

Higher Education as the management of consumer desires  

One compelling story of post-Fordist, experiential consumption sees the consumer as a Romantic dreamer, constructing the good life out of the stuff of the market  (see Campbell, 1987; McCraken, 1988). In this chapter we want to consider the ways in which higher education may facilitate, but also manage the consumer imagination and in doing so prepare students for contemporary work and spend culture.

Drawing from a phenomenological study of students at all levels of HE study at a vocational university, we consider the stories students provide about their decision to study for a degree and their experiences leading up to graduation and looking for a first job. We note how the decision to enrol on a degree may be informed by a daydream of a future lifestyle that focuses on material consumption supported by a job that the degree qualification will lead to. Here we see that a consumer imagination already frames the ‘purchase’ of education, where the degree is seen as providing a way to actualise a larger fantasy for the ‘good life’. The subject of study may be either peripheral to such a fantasy (for example the chosen course will lead to a job that is an ‘easy way to make money’), or is highly romanticised (media production students dream of being travel presenters; advertising students draw from popular representations of advertising in films, etc).

During their studies, students then take actions to ‘protect’ such fantasies and this may involve a rejection of activities that do not fit this idealised construction of their future lives. For example, students may avoid aspects of the course that are difficult (because their ideal job and life does not include these things) and may especially avoid aspects of a course that are critical of the jobs or lifestyles they have already internalised as desirable. This may focus the students’ attention on only the most exciting vocational aspects of a course. Here we see a self-indulgent preference for industry speakers who seem to embody the student fantasy, or practical work that allows the role-play and therefore aesthetic actualisation of the dream job.

As consumers, students feel that such a focus is justifiable and demand it, and as a service provider the university may feel inclined to pander to such requests, and may even exploit them in marketing material. However it also seems that it is possible that there is something of a war of attrition between the demands of study and the most fanciful of the students’ hopes for the future. Here students find that persistent challenges to their fantasies – such as exposure to the harsh reality of industry during placement, recognition of limitations in their own talent, and even the occasional access to criticism of industry practice from tutors and academic texts – leaves the student’s initial desires in peril and this may result in their modification or abandonment. The irony of this is that the university ends up being complicit in the downgrading of the daydreams it exploited to sell the course in the first place.

The marketisation of higher education through the lens of ‘career’

Careers education programmes have been introduced in many universities as optional or compulsory elements of undergraduate study. A 2006 survey of institutions showed that at least 40% are providing some form of credit-bearing careers education (Foskett and Johnston, 2006). It is easy to assume that careers education is a form of marketisation of higher education, a ‘dumbing down’ in which job interview skills have become as important as critical thinking or independent learning. Indeed, commentators such as Moreau and Leathwood (2006) suggest that employability interventions in the curriculum risk formalising the process by which students are encouraged to conform to middle class ideals or to blame themselves if structural inequalities in the labour market make it difficult for them to secure financial returns for their education. 

The author of this paper has conducted empirical work exploring the establishment and development of careers education modules in higher education. This work will be drawn on to show that the pressure for careers education to operate in marketised, simplistic ways is just as likely to come from within the academy as from without, with careers educators being asked to demonstrate the value of their programmes to their institution by the employment rates of graduates – a statistic more readily affected by the state of the economy than by the most expert teacher. Institutions can be unwilling to acknowledge that the cultural idea of the ‘career’ can be subject to scrutiny, research and teaching in the same way as other forms of knowledge.

By contrast, many careers educators, whether they come from careers guidance or lecturing backgrounds, strive to create space in their curriculum for critical thinking, debate, analysis and research-led activities. Increasingly programmes are being developed which include, but go beyond, the job-seeking process to critically examine the cultural and social ideals which are embedded in individual careers, and to investigate the relationship between research in higher education and social and political change. In these courses, ‘career’ means more than ‘paid work’, and can include education, voluntary work, family life and social networks.  

This article therefore argues that ‘career’ offers a lens through which to capture a picture of higher education today, in which students and lecturers alike can find their educational ideals under pressure from league tables and simplistic measures of ‘career success’. Indeed, I will argue that some students and lecturers are questioning and exploring these issues in sophisticated and challenging ways – not a trend that one would expect from reading the public debates on the relationship between a student’s educational and work ‘careers’.

Research Based Learning – changing the student role from consumers to contributors

Making links between research and teaching has been a strategic priority for HEIs for a number of years. This agenda has moved from a ‘research-informed’, towards a ‘research-based’ approach, where students become active participants in the research culture of their universities. Research into this pedagogical approach shows that it is an effective form of teaching and learning. This chapter reviews this literature but argues that the full potential of this pedagogical approach has yet to be fully appreciated. The chapter will argue that encouraging and supporting students to engage in research and research like activity, as an integral part of their undergraduate experience, has the capacity not only to teach students research skills, but can transform the ways in which students perceive themselves and their role within their university. The chapter will conclude by arguing that this change of roles includes not only how students see themselves as students, but that research based learning can transform how universities regard their  students, seeing them as contributors to the academic project of their institutions, rather than simply consumers of an academic product.

Conclusions

Implications of the Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer

Richard Scullion, Lizzie Nixon & Dr Mike Molesworth, Bournemouth University

In this chapter we aim to summarise the tensions, conflicts, benefits of and warnings against the marketisation of higher education in the UK and the implications of students adopting a consumer subject position. From the critical accounts and empirical work covered in the book, we particularly want to draw out implications for policy, funding, management of HEIs and for the practice of learning and teaching.

Final words

Professor Laurie Taylor, Times Higher Education columnist will offer final words from the University of Poppleton.

The editors are now drifting back into the university after summer breaks and conferences and we will shortly post an outline of the book and the abstracts here for comment and feedback.  In the mean time we aim to catch up on the many and ongoing stories in the media that relate to the marketization of UK Higher education.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407330&c=1 

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407206

In fact I hadn’t seen it yet. It a generous write up though given that it was unprompted. I wish we had been called before hand though becuase we could have plugged the book too.

Now will the VC here see this as successful research ‘impact’, or exactly the sort of thing that happens when staff are not trained to be ‘on brand’?