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Weekend read: What you need to know to make sense of the row about student loans

by Rob Cuthbert

In January and February the mainstream media were full of stories about the unfairness of student loans and the burdens on graduates facing huge debts and effective tax rates of more than 50%. They cut through in a way that the long-running stories about universities’ financial problems had not, and even dominated Parliamentary questions to the Prime Minister (PMQs) on 25 February 2026. But student loan repayments and universities’ financial problems are two sides of the same coin – how to finance mass higher education. The political debate about student loans is a case study in how almost everyone who didn’t know enough got almost everything wrong at first, until more realism gradually emerged.

Under Labour governments from 1997 there was a heated but, by comparison, measured debate about the costs of higher education, and who should pay for it. As HE participation rates soared from 10% towards 40-50% the international consensus was that it was reasonable for students or graduates to bear some of the cost. Higher education benefited society but also individuals who enjoyed a ‘graduate premium’ of higher lifelong earnings. Nevertheless, when the £1000 undergraduate tuition fee was raised to £3000 in 2003 it nearly brought down the Labour government. That probably represented about half of the total cost at that time. Students were of course vehemently opposed to fees, but for some in HE it felt about right to share the costs equally between students and general taxation.

Demand for HE continued to rise but total costs were controlled because government still determined total student numbers. Then came the Coalition government of 2011 with its determination to make higher education a market. The Liberal Democrats reversed their pre-election pledge to abolish student fees, instead agreeing as part of the coalition to triple fees to £9000. And government abolished its control on total student numbers. Universities Minister David Willetts claimed that student choice would “drive up quality”, but he, almost alone, expected a spectrum of fees from £6000-9000 to emerge. Everyone else realised that price would be the loudest signal of quality, and almost every university went for £9000.

The £9000 fee probably covered most of the costs of undergraduate tuition, although some grant funding remained for specialist high-cost courses, and Oxbridge complained that for them £13000 was the break-even figure. £9000 became the highest nationwide tuition fee in the world, and England still enjoys that dubious world-leading position. To keep higher education accessible to all, in theory at least, new arrangements were needed to make HE affordable at the point of delivery, with the cost being partly paid by students after graduation.

Under the new student loan system graduates would start to make repayments once their salary was above a specified threshold. Their debt would increase at a specified rate additional to the Retail Prices Index (RPI). The total repayments each month were capped, so most graduates would never repay their total debt, but any remaining debt was wiped out after 30 years. The explicit intention was that both fees and salary thresholds would rise with inflation.

This means that student loans are not like commercial loans. The system was never designed to get all the money back. It was designed to be progressive, like income tax, so that among graduates “those with the broadest shoulders”, as the Prime Minister likes to say, should bear a greater share of the repayment burden. In 2012 it was intended that the system should deliver about 72% of the total cost in repayments. The unmet cost (government subsidy) was known as the Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge.

Almost immediately the RAB charge began to rise above its planned level, and the government soon found it necessary to restrict enrolments in many new ‘challenger’ institutions, which were providing courses of debatable quality, mostly in business and management, mostly in London. Far from driving up quality, student choice seemed to be driving it down. But these problems paled into insignificance as the economy continued on its path of sluggish low growth. To make things worse, government had to abandon a “fiscal illusion” in government accounting, as the Office for National Statistics forced a justified change which put more costs onto current balance sheets rather than allowing them to be deferred for many years. For a while, the fact that interest rates were near zero concealed the punitive possibilities of debt levels and loan repayments, but then government – facing budgetary pressure – decided to freeze thresholds and change repayment terms. (Jim Dickinson’s Wonkhe blog on 2 February 2026 was a detailed explanation of how we got to where we are). Interest rates rose to 3-4% but government persisted with the use of RPI + 3% as the loan interest rate, even though for almost every other purpose it used the lower figure of CPI (consumer prices index). The current outcry on loans became inevitable; indeed, it had even been predicted by Nick Hillman, one of the architects of the loan system, who wrote in a 2014 Guardian article: “… come with me to the election of 2030. Those who began university when fees went up to £9,000 in 2012 will be in their mid-thirties by then. That is the average age of a first-time homebuyer and the typical age for female graduates to have their first child. By then, there will be millions of voters who owe large sums to the Student Loans Company but who need money for nappies and toys, not to mention childcare and mortgages. So, however reasonable student loans look on paper now, the graduates of tomorrow could end up a powerful electoral force.”

Meanwhile, some of the graduates of yesterday were quick to ride the coat-tails of the loans debate and cry “more means worse”, even as all the more successful world economies continue in the opposite direction. Often mentioned but never identified, ‘Mickey Mouse courses’ also took a supposed share of the blame, despite expert commentators like David Kernohan of Wonkhe pointing out the extreme difficulty of identifying them in ways that government or the regulator could operationalise. The Labour government adjusted its stance on exactly what the country needs with some vaguely quantified assertions about skills in its White Paper, and former Skills Minister Robert Halfon popped up on Times Radio on 14 February 2026 to argue, as he always did, for more apprenticeships. Acknowledging employers’ decades-long unwillingness to pay for training, he suggested they should be ‘incentivised’ with £1billion of public money. But even with public funding for employers’ costs, vocational training apprenticeships will mostly remain a great idea ‘for other people’s children’, as Alison Wolf once witheringly put it. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch got the kind of publicity she probably hoped for as she proposed in an ITV interview to help Plan 2 graduates by reducing interest rates, even as personal finance guru Martin Lewis pointed out this would only help the richest graduates, and the way to help people was by unfreezing the salary thresholds at which the higher repayments kicked in. He apologised for gatecrashing the interview, but he was quite right, and understandably frustrated. Badenoch said this could be afforded by removing 100,000 students on ‘low quality’ courses and using the consequent savings. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott, under pressure from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, waxed lyrical about LEO data on graduate salaries and suggested that Creative Arts courses were low quality and should feature in the 100,000 reduction. She refused to say that university closures could be ruled out, but there was, of course, no coherent plan for the supposed reductions and their effects on local economies, especially in regions where salaries are lower.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was unabashed and led with the topic at PMQs on 25 February 2026 and Jim Dickinson blogged the same day for Wonkhe, pointing out the problems with most of the interventions from backbenchers of all parties, and noting that things will soon get worse with barely-noticed measures affecting postgraduate student support in the previous budget. Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed to a review of the loans problem, but in Times Higher Education on 27 February 2026 Helen Packer had experts queueing up to point out that: “Quick tweaks to the terms of English student loans are unlikely to satisfy disgruntled graduates and may conflict with wider plans to reform post-16 education.”

The major problems with HE finance have still not yet had equivalent mainstream recognition. In recent years the tuition fee income of universities fell from £12billion to £10billion simply through inflation and the freezing of tuition fees. 40 % of universities are reporting deficits and the majority are making staff redundant. Government has unfrozen tuition fees but then hit universities with a levy on international student fees which more than wiped out the extra income from fee increases. Visa restrictions have also hit international student enrolment and severely reduced some universities’ opportunity to compensate for the losses on home students. In 2011 Universities UK hoped that accepting the £9000 fee would rescue the HE sector from the coming austerity, but the rescue was short-lived, as fees failed to rise with inflation. Now another government faces the challenge of finding a long-term sustainable solution to the problem of funding higher education. It seems far from the top of the agenda for the embattled Starmer administration, but the media outrage over student loans might push it higher.

Successive cohorts of students have experienced various Plans for repayment. The main problem is Plan 2, affecting students who started their courses from 2012-2013 to 2022-2023. The numbers rapidly become hugely confusing, and some commentators fail to recognise even such basic issues as the need to ensure that all costs and prices are on the same base. But almost all agree that Plan 2 is unfair and should be changed.

American students have more orthodox commercial loans to pay for their tuition and in the USA the growing scale of student debt also became a major political problem. However Americans are much more accustomed to the high costs of HE: the culture encourages parents to save from birth to pay for tuition, and the taxation system rewards both savings and loan repayments. In addition, a ‘borrower defense’ program, created in 1994, allows students to get loans cancelled if they are misled by their colleges about their future employment prospects. The Obama administration began to penalise institutions, mostly for-profit institutions, which did not adequately prepare students for gainful employment which would enable them to repay their loans. Student debt rose to about $1.6trillion; by January 2025 President Biden had forgiven $183.6billion of debt, before President Trump set out to turn the clock back. In the USA the ‘graduate premium’, the advantage for graduates who earn on average higher pay than non-graduates, has continued to rise despite continuing HE expansion, whereas in the UK, almost uniquely, the premium has declined. This suggests, as Jim Dickinson has argued on Wonkhe, that the problem is one of supply rather than demand – employers will not or cannot pay more in the sluggish UK economy. Graeme Atherton (West London) pointed out in Times Higher Education on 26 February 2026 that despite Trump’s changes the US system is still more progressive than Plan 2. John Burn-Murdoch had a telling chart in his Financial Times article on 16 February 2026, ‘Is higher education still worth it is the wrong question’, showing that in the UK the graduate premium had decreased from 1997-2022 as HE numbers increased, contrary to the trends in the USA, Canada, Netherlands, France and Spain.

The problem of financing UK HE remains unsolved and the clamour of vested interests has become almost deafening. The main architect of the fees regime, David Willetts, who wrote a book about intergenerational unfairness, tried hard on Conservative Home to blame someone else while defending progressive expansion rather than reduction in HE student numbers. Alternative solutions abound, but have not yet penetrated the mainstream media debate about HE policy. Nick Barr (LSE), a longstanding expert commentator on HE finance, wrote in July 2023 about ‘A fairer way to finance tertiary education’.  There was detailed and expert analysis in Financial modelling by London Economics in March 2024. In September 2024 Tim Leunig, a former Chief Analyst at the Department for Education wrote a HEPI blog on ‘Undergraduate fees revisited’ alongside his HEPI debate paper, which promised that “Highest earners would pay the most, as is appropriate in a social insurance scheme”. The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) in April 2025 published a report asking ‘How should undergraduate degrees be funded? A collection of essays’. Mike Larkin (emeritus, Queen’s University Belfast) posted on his Total Equality for Students blog on 13 January 2025 a detailed and plausible set of proposals for reform of the present system, summarising many of the attempts to initiate debate.

Yet it is only now that the financing of HE might creep into the mainstream debate, entering through the back door of unfair student loan repayments and threatening to deliver results that may help some graduates but damage higher education even more. Nick Hillman has argued persuasively that of the three main proposed solutions to the student loans furore, one is unwise, one unaffordable, one unpalatable, and all are unfair. Nevertheless, something must be done. Former Director of Fair Access John Blake, interviewed by Nicola Woolcock in The Times on 4 February 2026, said;“…  a system that feels so suffocating to so many is fundamentally broken, no matter how many graphs about average graduate salaries we make…. I think we may need to move to a formal graduate tax. There are no popular options here, it’s not just people saying I’m in debt and it’s going up every year. Even if the system computes, it has a sense of being ridiculous when you’re in it. This system has run out of road.” Blake is Director of the new think tank The Post-18 Project. ‘The walls are closing in on our doomed student loans system’, as Jim Dickinson wrote for Wonkhe on 11 February 2026.

When it started, the student loan system was perhaps financially logical, if you accepted its progressive premise of redistribution. Repeated government tinkering in the face of extreme budgetary pressure, especially the freezing of thresholds, made it successively more and more unfair, and has now exposed the underlying psychological and emotional illogicality. The oppressive psychological impact of the loan system on graduates facing a difficult job market makes it unsustainable. So what is to be done?

If  higher education is free, poor people who don’t go to university pay for the education of rich people who do. If students pay all the cost of their higher education, as is now being widely proposed, then everyone suffers because economic growth and incentives are diminished. We need to find a halfway house which shares the cost of higher education between graduates and the wider society which benefits from HE. The immediate challenge is to find a sustainable way to preserve the progressive and redistributive nature of student finance, which is not experienced by successive cohorts of graduates as oppressive and demotivating.

The Labour government has accepted the need for a comprehensive review of how HE should be financed, but it remains a work in progress, promised but not near the top of the agenda. Short-term budget fixes like the international students’ fees levy suggest that there is limited sympathy in government for the financial plight of many universities. Previous governments of various stripes have resorted to bipartisan national inquiries (Dearing, Browne) which straddle general elections to reduce their electoral risk, and such a device cannot be ruled out this time. The danger is that, under the short-term pressure of finding a fix for the student loans problem, government will lurch into a ‘solution’ with possibly massive collateral damage to the whole HE sector, and to local economies. Government is desperate not to increase its spending and borrowing any further, and in any case has other higher priorities than HE. But a solution to student loan repayments which requires HE to contain the cost of improving the system may force the closure of a significant number of universities, with long-term and possibly irreparable damage to their local communities and economies – probably mostly in the Midlands and the North, not London and the South East. Brian Bell (King’s College London) has just been appointed principal adviser to both the PM and the Chancellor on macroeconomics and fiscal policy. He spoke at an LSE event in February about migration, where he said, discouragingly: “I’m sure we’d all like for there to be a complete rethinking of university financing, and perhaps even the university model across the UK – perhaps we shouldn’t all be teaching three-year degrees in X and Y – perhaps we should have different universities doing different things. But I see no realistic prospect of that happening.” These are hard questions with no easy answers, but too many people are getting too many things wrong about both the costs and the benefits of higher education. Let us at least start by understanding what the problem is.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.


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Second-generation student borrowers

by Ariane de Gayardon

Since the 1980s, massification, policy shifts, and changing ideas about who benefits from higher education have led to the expansion of national student loan schemes globally. For instance, student loans were introduced in England in 1990 and generalized in 1998. Australia introduced income-contingent student loans in the late 1980s. While federal student loans were introduced in the US in 1958, their number and the amount of individual student loan debt ramped up in the 1990s.

A lot of academic research has analysed this trend, evaluating the effect of student loans on access, retention, success, the student experience, and even graduate outcomes. Yet, this research is based on the choices and experiences of first-generation student borrowers and might not apply to current and future students.

First-generation borrowers enter higher education with parents who have either not been to higher education, or who have a tertiary degree that pre-dates the expansion of student loans. The parents of first-generation borrowers therefore did not take up loans to pay for their higher education and had no associated repayment burden in adulthood. Any cost associated with these parents’ studies will likely have been shouldered by their families or through grants.

Second-generation borrowers are the offspring of first-generation borrowers. Their parents took out student loans to pay for their own higher education. The choices made by second-generation borrowers when it comes to higher education and its funding could significantly differ from first-generation borrowers, because they are impacted by their parents’ own experience with student loans.

Parents and parental experience indeed play an important role in children’s higher education choices and financial decisions. On the one hand, parents can provide financial or in-kind support for higher education. This is most evident in the design of student funding policies which often integrate parental income and financial contributions. In many countries, eligibility for financial aid is means-tested and based on family income (Williams & Usher, 2022). Examples include the US where an Expected Family Contribution is calculated upon assessment of financial need, or Germany where the financial aid system is based on a legal obligation for parents to contribute to their children’s study costs. Indeed, evidence shows that parents do contribute to students’ income. In Europe, family contributions make up nearly half of students’ income (Hauschildt et al, 2018). But the role of parents also extends to decisions about student loans: parents tend to try and shield their children from student debt, helping them financially when possible or encouraging cost-saving behaviour (West et al, 2015).

On the other hand, parents transmit financial values to their children, which might play a role in their higher education decisions. Family financial socialization theory states that children learn their financial attitudes and behaviour from their parents, through direct teaching and via family interactions and relationships (Gudmunson & Danes, 2011). Studies indeed show the intergenerational transmission of social norms and economic preferences (Maccoby, 1992), including attitudes towards general debt (Almenberg et al, 2021). Continuity of financial values over generations has been observed in the specific case of higher education. Parents who received parental financial support for their own studies are more likely to contribute toward their children’s studies (Steelman & Powell, 1991). For some students, negative parental experiences with general debt can lead to extreme student debt aversion (Zerquera et al,2016).

As countries globally rely increasingly on student loans to fund higher education, many more students will become second-generation borrowers. Because their parents had to repay their own student debt, the family’s financial assets may be depleted, potentially leading to reduced levels of parental financial support for higher education. This is likely to be even worse for students whose parents are still repaying their loans. In addition, parental experiences of student debt could influence the advice they give their children with regard to higher education financial decisions. As a result, this new generation of student borrowers will face challenges that their predecessors did not, fuelled by the transmitted experience of student loans from their parents (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Parental influence on second-generation borrowers

As the share of second-generation borrowers in the student body increases, the need to understand the decision-making process of these students when it comes to (financial) higher education choices is essential. Although the challenges faced by borrowers will emerge at different times and with varying intensity across countries — depending in part on loan repayment formats — we have an opportunity now to be ahead of the curve. By researching this new generation of student borrowers and their parents, we can better assess their financial dilemmas and the support they need, providing further evidence to design future-proof equitable student funding policies.

Ariane de Gayardon is Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) based at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.


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Customer Services

by Phil Pilkington

“…problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para 38 (original emphasis)

The paradigm shift of students to customers at the heart of higher education has changed strategies, psychological self-images, business models and much else. But are the claims for and against students as customers (SAC) and the related research as useful, insightful and angst ridden as we may at first think?  There are alarms about changing student behaviours and approaches to learning and the relationship towards academic staff but does the naming ‘customers’ reveal what were already underlying, long standing problems? Does the concentrated focus on SAC obscure rather than reveal?

One aspect of SAC is the observation that academic performance declines, and learning becomes more surface and instrumental (Bunce, 2017). Another is that SAC inclines students to be narcissist and aggressive, with HEI management pandering to the demands of both students and their feedback on the NSS, with other strategies to create iconic campus buildings, to maintain or improve league table position (Nixon, 2018).

This raises some methodological questions on (a) the research on academic performance and the degree of narcissism/aggression prior to SAC (ie around 1997 with the Dearing Report); (b) the scope and range of the research given the scale of student numbers, participation rates, the variety of student motivations, the nature of disciplines and their own learning strategies, and the hierarchy of institutions; and (c) the combination of (a) and (b) in the further question whether SAC changed the outlook of students to their education – or is it that we are paying more attention and making different interpretations?

Some argue that the mass system created in some way marketisation of HE and the SAC with all its attendant problems of changing the pedagogic relationship and cognitive approaches. Given Martin Trow’s definitions of elite, mass and universal systems of HE*, the UK achieved a mass system by the late 1980s to early 1990s with the rapid expansion of the polytechnics; universities were slower to expand student numbers. This expansion was before the introduction of the £1,000 top up fees of the Major government and the £3,000 introduced by David Blunkett (Secretary of State for Education in the new Blair government) immediately after the Dearing Report. It was after the 1997 election that the aspiration was for a universal HE system with a 50% participation rate.

If a mass system of HE came about (in a ‘fit of forgetfulness’ ) by 1991 when did marketisation begin? Marketisation may be a name we give to a practice or context which had existed previously but was tacit and culturally and historically deeper, hidden from view. The unnamed hierarchy of institutions of Oxbridge, Russell, polytechnics, HE colleges, FE colleges had powerful cultural and socio-political foundations and was a market of sorts (high to low value goods, access limited by social/cultural capital and price, etc). That hierarchy was not, however, necessarily top-down: the impact of social benefit of the ‘lower orders’ in that hierarchy would be significant in widening participation. The ‘higher order’ existed (and exists) in an ossified form. And as entry was restricted, the competition within the sector did not exist or did not present existential threats. Such is the longue durée when trying to analyse marketisation and the SAC.

The focus on marketisation should help us realise that over the long term the unit of resource was drastically reduced; state funding was slowly and then rapidly withdrawn to the point where the level of student enrolment was critical to long term strategy. That meant not maintaining but increasing student numbers when the potential pool of students would fluctuate – with  the present demographic trough ending in 2021 or 2022. Marketisation can thus be separated to some extent from the cognitive dissonance or other anxieties of the SAC. HEIs (with exceptions in the long-established hierarchy) were driven by the external forces of the funding regime to develop marketing strategies, branding and gaming feedback systems in response to the competition for students and the creation of interest groups – Alliance, Modern, et al. The enrolled students were not the customers in the marketisation but the product or outcome of successful management. The students change to customers as the focus is then on results, employment and further study rates. Such is the split personality of institutional management here.

Research on SAC in STEM courses has a noted inclination to surface learning and the instrumentalism of ‘getting a good grade in order to get a good job’, but this prompts further questions. I am not sure that this is an increased inclination to surface learning, nor whether surface and deep are uncritical norms we can readily employ. The HEAC definition of deep learning has an element of ‘employability’ in the application of knowledge across differing contexts and disciplines (Howie and Bagnall, 2012). A student in 2019 may face the imperative to get a ‘degree level’ job in order to pay back student loans. This is rational related to the student loans regime and widening participation, meaning this imperative is not universally applied given the differing socio-economic backgrounds of all students.

(Note that the current loan system is highly regressive as a form of ‘graduate tax’.)

And were STEM students more inclined toward deep or surface learning before they became SAC?  Teaching and assessment in STEM may have been poorand may have encouraged surface level learning (eg through weekly phase tests which were tardily assessed).

What is deep learning in civil engineering when faced with stress testing concrete girders or in solving quarternion equations in mathematics: is much of STEM actually knowing and processing algorithms? How is such learnable content in STEM equivalent in some cognitive way to the deep learning in modern languages, history, psychology et al? This is not to suggest a hierarchy of disciplines but differences, deep differences, between rules-based disciplines and the humanities.

Learning is complex and individualised, and responsive to, without entirely determining, the curriculum and the forms of its delivery. In the research on SAC the assumptions are that teaching and assessment delivery is both relatively unproblematic and designed to encourage deep, non-instrumental learning. Expectations of the curriculum delivery and assessment will vary amongst students depending on personal background of schooling and parents, the discipline and personal motivations and the expectations will often be unrealistic. Consider why they are unrealistic – more than the narcissism of being a customer. (There is a very wide range of varieties of customer: as a customer of Network Rail I am more a supplicant than a narcissist.)

The alarm over the changes (?) to the students’ view of their learning as SAC in STEM should be put in the context of the previously high drop-out rate of STEM students (relatively higher than non-STEM) which could reach 30% of a cohort. The causes of drop out were thoroughly examined by Mantz Yorke(Yorke and Longden, 2004), but as regards the SAC issue here, STEM drop outs were explained by tutors as lack of the right mathematical preparation. There is comparatively little research on the motivations for students entering STEM courses before they became SAC; such research is not over the long term or longitudinal. However, research on the typology of students with differing motivations for learning (the academic, the social, the questioning student etc) ranged across all courses, does exist (a 20 year survey by Liz Beatty, 2005). Is it possible that after widening participation to the point of a universal system, motivations towards the instrumental or utilitarian will become more prominent? And is there an implication that an elite HE system pre-SAC was less instrumentalist, less surface learning? The creation of PPE (first Oxford in 1921 then spreading across the sector) was an attempt to produce a mandarin class, where career ambition was designed into the academic disciplines. That is, ‘to get a good job’ applies here too but it will be expressed in different, indirect and elevated ways of public service.**

There are some anachronisms in the research on SAC. The acceptance of SAC by management, by producing student charters and providing students places on boards, committees and senior management meetings is not a direct result of students or management considering students as customers. Indeed, it predates SAC by many years and has its origins in the 1960s and 70s.

I am unlikely to get onto the board of Morrisons, but I could for the Co-op – a discussion point on partnerships, co-producers, membership of a community of learners. The struggle by students to get representation in management has taken fifty years from the Wilson government Blue Paper Student Protest (1970) to today. It may have been a concession, but student representation changed the nature of HEIs in the process, prior to SAC. Student Charters appear to be mostly a coherent, user-friendly reduction of lengthy academic and other regulations that no party can comprehend without extensive lawyerly study. A number of HEIs produced charters before the SAC era (late 1990s). And iconic university buildings have been significantly attractive in the architectural profession a long time before SAC – Birmingham’s aspiration to be an independent city state with its Venetian architecture recalling St Mark’s Square under the supervision of Joseph Chamberlain (1890s) or Jim Stirling’s post-modern Engineering faculty building at Leicester (1963) etc (Cannandine 2002).

Students have complex legal identities and are a complex and often fissiparous body. They are customers of catering, they are members of a guild or union, learners, activists and campaigners, clients, tenants, volunteers, sometimes disciplined as the accused, or the appellant, they adopt and create new identities psychologically, culturally and sexually. The language of students as customers creates a language game that excludes other concerns: the withdrawal of state funding, the creation of an academic precariat, the purpose of HE for learning and skills supply, an alienation from a community by the persuasive self-image as atomised customer, how deep learning is a creature of disciplines and the changing job market, that student-academic relations were problematic and now become formalised ‘complaints’. Students are not the ‘other’ and they are much more than customers.

Phil Pilkington is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.

*Martin Trow defined an elite, mass and universal systems of HE by participation rates of 10-20%, 20-30% and 40-50% respectively.

** Trevor Pateman, The Poverty of PPE, Oxford, 1968; a pamphlet criticising the course by a graduate; it is acknowledged that the curriculum, ‘designed to run the Raj in 1936’, has changed little since that critique. This document is a fragment of another history of higher education worthy of recovery: of complaint and dissatisfaction with teaching and there were others who developed the ‘alternative prospectus’ movement in the 1970s and 80s.

References

Beatty L, Gibbs G, and Morgan A (2005) ‘Learning orientations and study contracts’, in Marton, F, Hounsell, D and Entwistle, N, (eds) (2005) The Experience of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education, 3rd (Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment.

Bunce, Louise (2017) ‘The student-as-consumer approach in HE and its effects on academic performance’, Studies in Higher Education, 42(11): 1958-1978

Howie P and Bagnall R (2012) ‘A critique of the deep and surface learning model’, Teaching in Higher Education 18(4); they state the distinction of learning is “imprecise conceptualisation, ambiguous language, circularity and a lack of definition…”

Nixon, E, Scullion, R and Hearn, R (2018) ‘Her majesty the student: marketised higher education and the narcissistic (dis)satisfaction of the student consumer’, Studies in Higher Education  43(6): 927-943

Cannandine, David (2004), The ‘Chamberlain Tradition’, in In Churchill’s Shadow, Oxford: Oxford University Press; his biographical sketch of Joe Chamberlain shows his vision of Birmingham as an alternative power base to London.

Yorke M and Longden B (2004) Retention and student success in higher education, Maidenhead: SRHE/Open University Press