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International students as a national project: how states brand their higher education

by Evelyn Kim, Annette Bamberger and Sazana Jayadeva

From student choice to state strategy

International student mobility is often framed as a story of individual aspiration. Students, it is widely assumed, choose destinations based on rational calculations of what they stand to gain: prestigious degrees, global networks, enhanced career prospects, and immersion in new sociocultural contexts amongst others. This narrative centres students and to a lesser extent institutions, which compete for their patronage. Yet it often obscures the role of the state in shaping where, and how, international education is imagined in the first place (Bamberger & Kim, 2022; Sidhu, 2006).

The recruitment of international students has increasingly become a national project. While established destinations such as the UK have long maintained coordinated campaigns and online platforms to promote their higher education systems, what is particularly noteworthy today is the spread of such initiatives across a wider range of countries. Governments now invest in coordinated branding campaigns, frequently under the moniker “Study in X” websites (such as Study in Hong Kong and Study in Germany), that promote entire higher education systems under the national banner, often accompanied by social media channels such as Facebook and YouTube. These platforms are carefully curated spaces through which states project what they perceive makes their country distinctive and attractive as a study destination.

We argue that this constitutes a form of nation branding: the strategic creation and projection of ‘the nation’ throughhigher education (Kim & Bamberger, 2025; Lomer et al, 2018). These campaigns do not focus solely on academic excellence or global competitiveness. They weave together claims about innovation, economic power, cultural richness, affordability and safety, constructing an integrated narrative in which higher education becomes a gateway to the nation.

The persuasive strategies used in these campaigns vary. Some build credibility through rankings and research metrics, while others appeal to emotion by invoking culture and a sense of belonging. Still others foreground practical considerations such as affordability or post-study employment opportunities. Across these approaches, national higher education branding relies on distinctive “identity markers” to position countries as attractive study destinations Particularly in contexts associated with geopolitical or social tensions, branding efforts may seek to recalibrate external perceptions by foregrounding narratives of excellence and stability, while leaving more contentious political realities out of view.

It is in such contexts that national higher education branding becomes most revealing. As we examine in our recent article, India, Israel and South Korea offer striking examples (Bamberger et al, 2026). These countries embarked on higher education internationalisation at different moments, with Korea taking an early lead in the 2000s, while India and Israel launched major initiatives in the late 2010s. All three have seen notable growth in international student enrolments over the past two decades, even if they still host far fewer students than established Anglo-European destinations. Each is also a relatively young political state with strong ethnonational identities, close ties to diasporic communities, and enduring regional geopolitical tensions. These dynamics shape how the nation is perceived internationally, making higher education branding a particularly strategic tool.

To explore how destinations beyond the established core construct their national higher education brands, we analysed how three government-affiliated websites – Study in Korea, Study in India and Study in Israel – have evolved since their launch, drawing on both archival versions of the websites and their current content. We traced the identity markers these websites create over time: who they claim to be, what they omit, and how they try to persuade prospective international students.

What quickly became clear was that these platforms do far more than market universities. They tell a broader story about the nation itself. Familiar tropes in higher education marketing, such as academic excellence and global competitiveness feature prominently, but so too do promises of cultural experiences, inclusive and vibrant student life, and future career opportunities.

Yet the stories these websites tell are not the same. While several identity markers recur across the campaigns, each country communicates them in strikingly different ways.

Different paths, different priorities

One of the most striking findings from our research is that national higher education brands evolve in markedly different ways. The trajectories of these campaigns reflect shifting national priorities, as well as how each country positions itself within the global higher education landscape.

South Korea’s branding demonstrates the greatest degree of adaptation. Early versions of the Study in Korea platform emphasised the country’s rapid transformation from post-war hardship to global economic success, drawing on emotional and credibility-based appeals. Over time, however, the narrative shifts toward measurable indicators of performance, with global rankings, international assessments such as OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, and employability becoming central to claims of excellence. These comparisons often highlight how neighbouring countries perform, particularly where they rank lower. In this way, regional comparison becomes evidence of South Korea’s educational strength.

More recently, emotional appeals have re-emerged through international student ambassadors and social media storytelling, alongside a stronger emphasis on post-graduation employment opportunities, reflecting mounting concerns about South Korea’s shrinking workforce.

India’s campaign, by contrast, has followed a trajectory of relative continuity, albeit with subtle shifts. The Study in India website consistently foregrounds civilisational heritage, multiculturalism and the country’s long history as a centre of learning, positioning India as both ancient and globally connected. In early versions of the website, it drew on narratives predominantly associated with Hindu civilisational traditions to position India as an enduring source of knowledge and spiritual heritage. These were complemented by claims about the scale and diversity of India’s contemporary higher education system, as well as portrayals of India as a “pocket-friendly” and accessible destination.

However, more recently, signs of change have begun to emerge. There has been a gradual recalibration in emphasis, with a relative de-emphasis of cultural and civilisational narratives in favour of more pragmatic appeals to affordability, accessibility and global competitiveness. While the overall framing remains stable, these shifts suggest an attempt to reposition India more clearly within an increasingly competitive international education market.

Israel represents yet another trajectory. Since its launch in 2017, the Study in Israel website has changed relatively little despite major geopolitical developments, suggesting that national higher education branding may not always be a sustained policy priority. The campaign continues to project a stable narrative centred on innovation, positioning higher education within the country’s reputation as a “Start-Up Nation”. In this framing, higher education is closely associated with research intensity, technological entrepreneurship and strong links to high-tech industries. The campaign also emphasises academic excellence and draws on representations of Israel’s religious and historical heritage, alongside a tourism-oriented student experience. It further constructs distinct appeals to both international students and the Jewish diaspora.

What the branding leaves unsaid

Notably, the campaigns also reveal what is left unsaid. None of the websites explicitly addresses the longstanding geopolitical tensions surrounding these countries, including regional conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, and the Korean peninsula. Instead, these platforms largely sidestep overt political issues and historical disputes, foregrounding alternative narratives that present the nation as stable and welcoming.

Multiculturalism and openness are frequently emphasised, particularly in the cases of India and Israel, where appeals to tolerance and diversity help construct an image of inclusivity. Safety also emerges as a prominent marker in Israel’s campaign, which provides detailed descriptions of security infrastructure while simultaneously presenting an image of harmonious coexistence that downplays more complex social and political realities.

This selectivity, we posit, is not incidental, but the result of deliberate curation in how the nation is represented to external audiences. What is highlighted, and what is omitted, reflects a broader effort to position the country favourably within international student mobility flows, echoing critiques of national education branding as a selective and performative practice (Stein, 2018).

Seen in this light, national higher education branding becomes more than a strategy for attracting students. It is a state-led project through which countries mobilise particular identity markers and, in doing so, position themselves within an increasingly competitive and multipolar global higher education landscape.

Evelyn Min Ji Kim is Lecturer in Education in Asia at the UCL Institute of Education, where she also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Global Higher Education. Her research centres on student happiness and well-being policies, the global governance of education policymaking, and the internationalisation of higher education.

Annette Bamberger is Lecturer in Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education and Senior Lecturer and Head of Higher Education Track at Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University.

Sazana Jayadeva is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Sociology and co-convenes SRHE’s International Research and Researchers’ Network. She is also affiliated with the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Germany as an Associate Researcher. Her research revolves around the broad themes of education, migration, and digital and social media.

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What will the Office for Students do now?

by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News Editorial, April 2026

The Office for Students has had a significant reset, after it was heavily criticised, not just by the HE sector, but also in a coruscating report by the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee in 2023. That report said “the regulator had a poor relationship with both students and providers, and that it lacked independence from the government.” In January 2024 the National Audit Office produced a scathing report on student finance in franchised providers, and Sir David Behan was commissioned to produce an independent review of the Office for Students, published in July 2024 as Fit for the Future: Higher Education Regulation Towards 2035. After the general election in 2024 the new Labour Government replaced the Chair of the OfS, former Conservative MP Lord Wharton, appointing Edward Peck CBE, the widely-experienced former VC at Nottingham Trent in March 2025. Peck had been appointed by DFE as the first Higher Education Student Support Champion in 2022, so might be seen as bipartisan. OfS chief executive Susan Lapworth left at Easter 2026, and John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation, left in 2025 to join Wonkhe’s new venture The Post-18 Project, replaced on an interim basis by his widely-respected predecessor Chris Millward.

There are now almost 500 OfS staff, about twice as many as the Higher Education Funding Council for England had when it was disbanded. The Chief Executive has a leadership team comprising eight ‘Directors’ and another 13 ‘Senior leaders’; it is difficult for outsiders to understand exactly who is responsible for what. There are Directors for: Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom; Quality and Access; Strategy and Delivery; Regulation, and Enabling Regulation; Resources and Finance (2); and Legal Counsel (but, mysteriously, not the Director of Fair Access and Participation). The ‘Senior Leaders’ are Heads of: Interventions; Monitoring; Student Equality and Welfare; Financial Sustainability; Enforcement; Quality and Standards; Communications; Market Entry; Chief Data Officer; Student Outcomes; Provider Governance; Consumer Protection; Pathways and Funding.

If only most problems would fit into those pigeonholes – there must be a lot of day-to-day negotiation about who leads on which issues. With 500 staff there is scope to give every one of the 424 institutions under OfS regulation a different contact person, without even troubling the 22-strong leadership team, but perhaps that would just be too easy to understand. Behan’s 25th recommendation was “That the OfS develops a more transparent style of communications to demonstrate to the sector its independence from government.” It could start with more communication about staff and how the organisation is supposed to work.

New chair Peck wasted no time in recasting the OfS strategy to take account of the many criticisms of the OfS. After the Lords inquiry the Behan review called for a narrower focus on key priorities, and the Strategy for 2025-2030 said the OfS goals were “grouped into three areas”: quality; student experience and support; and sector resilience. Equality of opportunity was “woven into everything we do”. Peck chose four phrases to capture the approach:

  • “Ambitious for all students from all backgrounds”
  • “Collaborative in pursuit of our priorities and in our stewardship of the sector”
  • “Vigilant about safeguarding public money and student fees”
  • “Vocal that higher education is a force for good, for individuals, communities and the country”

The OfS announced on 30 March that Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne had been appointed as the new CEO of the OfS, job-sharing as they did as Director-General at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, after previously being DCMS interim Permanent Secretary during 2023. They also job-shared as Director of Higher Education in the DfE from 2014-2017. Josh Fleming, current director of strategy and delivery at the OfS, will be interim chief executive until Hannant and Payne take up their new role on 15 June 2026. How will they make the new strategy work? What will be at the top of their agenda?

Their first problem is that the Office for Students, because of its name and remit, has a Strategy which can only deal obliquely with the most pressing and interconnected problems facing English HE: finding a way to finance HE sustainably (and sorting out the student loans row) and finding a way to cope with the many failures of the statutory HE market. Issues of academic freedom, freedom of speech and the once-ubiquitous culture wars may now be receding in prominence; at least, that will be the hope on all sides. Financing and markets will be the primary concern of the DfE’s promised review of HE finance, but there is no reason to suppose it will appear soon. Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently declared that the student loans issue was not top of her agenda. This gives scope for the new brooms at the OfS to rearrange the HE furniture in ways which may guide the DfE development of workable proposals.

The NAO issued a damning report on 7 December 2017 on The higher education market. It said that, if HE had been a financial product, they would be complaining of mis-selling by universities. But the NAO’s deeper criticism was of the idea that HE could be treated as a market at all, with the report listing all the ways that the market and its regulation fell short of what was necessary and desirable. The new chief executive(s) at OfS were in charge of HE at the DfE from 2014-2017. They must have been closely involved with the NAO investigation, but even more closely involved in the passage of the Higher Education Act 2017, which created a statutory HE market and the Office for Students.

Markets, student tuition fees and higher education financing have been inextricably linked since 2017. The Labour government in 2006 raised undergraduate full-time fees from £1000pa to £3000pa and created income-contingent loans as a means of repayment. In the 2010 general election a new Coalition government faced the perennial question of how to finance mass HE. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg had made a very public pre-election ‘pledge’ to abolish undergraduate fees, but instead  the government tripled them, to £9000 pa from 2012. Deciding exactly how to make it work proved to be rather tricky. David Willetts, the universities minister in BIS, repeatedly promised an HE Bill setting out new policy, but it took years to arrive, prompting scepticism if not ridicule. Willetts declared that markets would “drive up quality” in HE. The hare had been running on ‘low quality courses’ even before Labour HE minister Margaret Hodge complained about ‘Mickey Mouse courses’ in universities (so the hare was really Bugs Bunny). Willetts believed that HE institutions would choose to set fees in a range from £6000-9000, reflecting their supposed ‘competitiveness’ in the market. Every university, of course, understood that price signals quality and accordingly set fees at £9000. From that moment the HE market – as imagined by statute – was dead.

Nevertheless the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act institutionalised the economic idea that markets and regulation are the answer to effective performance of the whole HE sector, even though Willetts’ Special Adviser Nick Hillman always knew that “Straight comparisons between regular markets and educational markets don’t actually make much sense.”, as he said in response to the 2017 NAO report.  By 2017 Willetts had been replaced by Jo Johnson (later ennobled by his brother Boris), who doubled down on the script about “low-quality courses”, as did most of his many successors, with the honourable exception of Chris Skidmore.

Behan’s review said:

“I am of the view that higher education is not a ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’ market, but rather a ‘quasi-market’. Some of the reasons for this include:

• There is a complex relationship of choice between the student and the provider whereby students’ choices are dictated not solely by their preferences, but also by their expectations at being accepted/rejected by the provider.

• Government not only sets the price of a domestic undergraduate course that a provider can charge, but also heavily funds the sector through student loans.

• There are numerous and significant cross-subsidies between cohorts of students. 

• There are significant asymmetries of power and information between providers and students. Taking on a student loan and pursuing higher education is likely to be the biggest contract new undergraduate students will ever have entered.” 

With that list of deficiencies, calling HE a ‘quasi-market’ was charitable, even if – at a stretch – it reflected academic thinking. HE providers responded to the market in various ways, many eventually frowned on or outlawed. After 2010 new ‘challenger institutions’ expanded sub-degree business courses in London, exploiting the income from students able to gain £9000 tuition fee loans – money paid direct to institutions. They grew so much that in 2013 23 private colleges were suspended from student loans eligibility by the DfE. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand.

As universities increasingly suffered from rising cost but frozen tuition fees, many saw international student recruitment as the answer. Increasing numbers of universities outside London decided to open a London campus to exploit the overseas market, but were and still are criticised for it. The sector’s broad reliance on optimistic projections for international recruitment was deemed unsustainable and too risky. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand – but it decided to cash in anyway, with a levy on institutions for every international student recruited. Meanwhile some institutions thought they could still tap into new demand by expanding franchise relationships with partner colleges, but some of the largest of these have also now been discouraged or discredited. Government didn’t want that kind of response to market demand either.

Despite the downturn in franchising some people made a lot of money. Mike Ratcliffe noted on his MoreMeansBetter blog that the for-profit London School of Commerce had been “… incredibly profitable, with over £100 million paid in dividends to the family that own it.” He asked “Surely we can’t allow companies to stop being providers but to hang onto tens of millions in cash or other assets if either there have been a majority of non-genuine students or only a fraction of genuine students have completed their courses?”. It seems there were Mickey Mouse students as well as Mickey Mouse courses. Elsewhere, responsible HE institutions faced increasing financial problems as their real income fell precipitously. That line in the OfS strategy about resilience has a lot of work to do, and the OfS should look again at Behan’s recommendation “That the OfS board reviews its risk appetite framework and approach with a view to becoming more proactive in anticipating, identifying, and responding rapidly to address emerging risk.” After all, the new Strategy says; “We intervene where we have concerns that public money is not being used as intended …”

Students have repeatedly pronounced themselves largely satisfied with their course experiences in successive National Student Surveys, but this did little to quell the politicians’ and media obsession with course quality. The 2017 Act envisaged a Designated Quality Body to work with the OfS, the QAA was accordingly designated, but the OfS set increasingly restrictive conditions which the QAA ultimately deemed incompatible with its international role and credibility. The House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee

“… expressed concern about the circumstances surrounding the QAA’s de-designation … The QAA … “blamed” this suspension on the “OfS’ regulatory approach”. The committee said it was “concerning” that England’s regulatory framework had “shifted away from European standards” because it had the potential to damage the international reputation of England’s HE sector. … it was unclear if the OfS had the capability to take on the role previously carried out by the QAA. It called on the regulator to align its framework with international standards and to appoint the QAA or another arms-length body to perform the quality assurance role.”

The OfS instead formed an apparently permanent intention to conduct quality investigations itself, defying the explicit intention of the 2017 Act. OfS now has many Senior Leaders with a finger in the pie, presumably including those for Interventions, Monitoring, Enforcement, Student Outcomes, and Consumer Protection, but most of the others might have grounds to join in.

The quality investigations by OfS generally reach conclusions much too late to benefit the students whose experience prompted the investigations. The OfS strategy says: “We will help drive improvement across the sector, recognising that while much provision is already excellent, there is room to improve further. And we will hold institutions to account when they fall short.” So far the OfS investigations have focused on newer providers or universities near the bottom of the pecking order. The OfS has not, for example, investigated the very public problems with veterinary courses at Cambridge. In those as in many others it seems that institutional self-regulation can deliver better and quicker results.

Those with long memories will recall the opposition of the pre-1992 universities to any incursions by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, as it then was, which had the run of post-1992s. But HMI were able exactly to be “proactive in anticipating, identifying, and responding rapidly to address emerging risk.” Perhaps the OfS should not only reappoint a DQB but also look around for an independent and respected cadre of, say, His Majesty’s Inspectors. Behan said: ”The OfS should develop its regulatory model to create a virtuous policy circle with the objective of driving improvements in the quality of the higher education sector, and thus acting in the interests of students. The OfS and higher education providers should regard quality improvement as their common shared goal.”

English HE continues to be highly respected and in demand worldwide, but time is running out. The ‘narrow reputational range’ acclaimed by David Watson is jeopardised by misbehaviour by some new providers, misjudgments by a handful of institutions in desperate financial straits, and cutbacks  everywhere. Nevertheless, the National Student Survey shows that students continue to be broadly satisfied, while identifying particular problems such as feedback which institutions have worked hard to address. Some in the media persist in asking “Is higher education worth it?” by highlighting graduate debt, but student demand remains doggedly high. This suggests that you really can’t buck the market, and what we need is the right kind of review to deal with the student loans row and make higher education finances sustainable. In this the OfS has a huge role to play: the new OfS Chief Executives have to transform how the OfS works, to live up to this optimistic but necessary condition for success: “We will deliver our work in collaboration with students and the institutions we regulate. Accepting there will be issues on which we disagree, we will cultivate relationships based on mutual respect, confidence and trust. We will work with student bodies, sector agencies and other partners that share responsibility for stewardship of this important sector to support a cohesive regulatory environment and foster a thriving ecosystem equipped to create opportunity and drive growth. We will champion the many benefits of higher education for society, culture and the economy and regulate in a way that enables universities and colleges to drive growth, create opportunity, champion free expression and support a flourishing society.”

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner,Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.

Paul Temple


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From ‘predict and provide’ to ‘mitigate the risk’: thoughts on the state and higher education in Britain

by Paul Temple

January 2020 marks the second year of the Office for Students’ (OfS) operations. The OfS represents the latest organisational iteration of state direction of (once) British and (now) English higher education, stretching back to the creation of the University Grants Committee (UGC) in 1919. We therefore have a century’s-worth of experience to draw on: what lessons might there be?

There are, I think, two ways to consider the cavalcade of agencies that have passed through the British higher education landscape since 1919. One is to see in it how higher education has been viewed at various points over the last century. The other way is to see it as special cases of methods of controlling public bodies generally. I think that both perspectives can help us to understand what has happened and why.

In the post-war decades, up to the later 1970s, central planning was almost unquestioningly accepted across the political spectrum in Britain as the correct way to direct nationalised industries such as electricity and railways, but also to plan the economy as a whole, as the National Plan of 1965 showed. In higher education, broadly similar methods – predict and provide – were operated by the UGC for universities, and by a partnership of central government and local authorities for the polytechnics and other colleges. A key feature of this mode of regulation was expert judgement, largely insulated from political pressures. As Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath observe in The Governance of British Higher Education (Bloomsbury, 2020), “In the 1950s it had been the UGC, not officials in the ministry, who initiated policy discussions about the forecast rate of student number expansion and its financial implications, and it was the UGC, not a minister, that proposed founding the 1960s ‘New Universities’” (p18).

Higher education, then, was viewed as a collective national resource, to be largely centrally planned and funded, in a similar way to nationalised industries.

The rejection of central planning methods by the Thatcher governments (1979-1990) affected the control of higher education as it did other areas of national life through the ‘privatisation’ of public enterprises. Instead, resource allocation decisions were to be made by markets, or where normal markets were absent, as with higher education, by using ‘quasi-markets’ to allocate public funds. Accordingly the UGC was abolished by legislation in 1988, and (eventually) national funding bodies were created, the English version being the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Whereas the UGC had a key task of preserving academic standards, by maintaining the ‘unit of resource’ at what was considered to be an adequate level of funding per student (as a proxy for academic standards), HEFCE’s new task, little-noted at the time, became the polar opposite: it was required to drive down unit costs per student, thereby supposedly forcing universities to make the efficiency gains to be expected of normal market forces.

The market, then, had supplanted central planning as an organising principle in British public life (perhaps the lasting legacy of the Thatcher era); and universities discovered that the seemingly technical changes to their funding arrangements had profoundly altered their internal economies.

HEFCE’s main task, however, as with the UGC before it, was to allocate public money to universities, though now applying a different methodology. The next big shift in English higher education policy, under the 2010 coalition government, changed the nature of central direction radically. Under the full-cost fees policy, universities now typically received most of their income from student loans, making HEFCE’s funding role largely redundant. So, after the usual lag between policy change and institutional restructuring, a new agency was created in 2018, the Office for Students (OfS), modelled on the lines of industry regulators for privatised utilities such as energy and telecoms.

In contrast to its predecessor agencies, OfS is neither a planning nor a funding body (except for some special cases). Instead, as with other industry regulators, it assumes that a market exists, but that its imperfect nature (information asymmetry being a particular concern) calls for detailed oversight and possibly intervention, in order to ‘mitigate the risk’ of abuses by providers (universities) which could damage the interests of consumers (students). It has no interest in maintaining a particular pattern of institutional provision, though it does require that external quality assurance bodies validate academic standards in the institutions it registers.

As with utilities, we have seen a shift in Britain, in stages, from central planning and funding, to a fragmented but regulated provision. The underlying assumption is that market forces will have beneficial results, subject to the regulator preventing abuses and ensuring that minimal standards are maintained. This approach is now so widespread in Britain that the government has produced a code to regulate the regulators (presumably anticipating the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?).

Examining the changing pattern of state direction of higher education in England in the post-1945 period, then, we see the demise of central planning and its replacement, first by quasi-markets, and then by as close to the real thing as we are likely to get. Ideas of central funding to support planning goals have been replaced by reliance on a market with government-created consumers, overseen by a regulator, intervening in the detail (see OfS’s long list of ‘reportable events’) of institutional management.

Despite every effort by governments to create a working higher education marketplace, the core features of higher education get in the way of it being a consumer good (for the many reasons that are repeatedly pointed out to and repeatedly ignored by ministers). Central planning has gone, but its replacement depends on central funding and central intervention. I don’t think that we’ve seen the last of formal central planning in our sector.

SRHE member Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London. See his latest paper ‘University spaces: Creating cité and place’, London Review of Education, 17 (2): 223–235 at https://doi.org/10.18546


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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


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University Governance

by Phil Pilkington

There has been widespread discussion and outrage about the pay and reward of Vice Chancellors and their accountability to their governing bodies. In addition, there is discussion about the need to provide greater support for the lay members who govern universities, and the related need for the reform of institutional management to be less dependent upon an individual’s abilities as manager-leaders in a complex environment (‘less analogue and more digital’, Mark Leach, WonkHE).

A recent concern was whether ex-VCs should be encouraged to join the governing boards to provide some empathetic support for the management, and perhaps an independent but expert view of management in HE for the benefit of lay governors.

Another complaint has been the lack of gender balance and BAME representation on Boards of Governance, with women comprising 32% of board members (Sherer and Zakaria, 2018). There are other critical matters: civic engagement and the relationship with the local community; disproportionate pay increases for VCs and the consequent demoralisation of staff; the worsening conditions of all employees in pay and ‘contracting out’ to global corporations; calls for the democratisation of universities; and strategic engagement with political change. Issues such as freedom of speech, Prevent, institutional autonomy, public understanding of science to international partnerships and more are all directly or indirectly connected to the nature of governance. The governance of US universities is said to involve the triple duty of fiduciary, academic and moral responsibilities; there may be no limit to the responsibilities of governors.

A recent colloquium on governance focussed on the need for creativity in the global market of higher education and the needs for science innovation and pedagogic development (University Governance and Creativity, European Review, Cambridge, 2018). Whatever the limited pool of talent available for the lay governance of universities the UK stands strong in the league table for sectoral autonomy, scoring top at 100% in the European University Association (EUA) review in 2017. This is nonsense. Or rather, the concept of autonomy is nonsense for universities. It is an enlightenment concept out of Kant as a condition for moral agency and the categorical imperative. ‘Independence’ may be a better term to be used for organisations, but independence from what or whom? No organisation (or person) is context free or without history.

Explanations of university autonomy often appeal to von Humboldt and/or Newman; both had contextual arguments for independence from. In the first case, independence from crazed minor princes in the Holy Roman Empire or a Prussian king seeking fame as an enlightened autocrat making whimsical appointments; in the second, independence from the strictures of a bone-headed clergy in Dublin. (Interestingly, public state universities in the USA have senior appointments made by the state governor, boneheaded creationist or not.) Given the constraints and historical conditions for universities the question arises: is the governance what is needed? A related question then is what are universities dependent upon?

The EUA review of degrees of autonomy is flawed in assessing governance as either unitary or binary. In a unitary model the board of governors receives a strong or determining input from a senate or academic board. In the binary model the academic receives instruction from the governance/ management. The UK is assumed by the EUA to be a unitary model, but any academic input is strongly mediated by the management/executive, which to a large degree determines the agenda for the boards of governance and also sets the conditions for academic performance and structures. How can autonomy be graded? In the same way we might ask: how can uniqueness be conditional?

The end of the public sector higher education (PSHE) sector ended not just the polytechnics (and the soon to be promoted colleges of HE), it ended an accountability regime linked to local democracy. The Education Reform Act 1988 not only abolished that mechanism for local accountability (and, for good measure, the architecture of accountability with the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority and regional advisory councils), it put in place a system for the self-replication of governing bodies once Secretary of State Kenneth Baker had approved the initial tranche of governors. 30 years later we have a uniform system of accountability dominated by a specific professional outlook and culture. 

A sample of the experiences of governors, if we ignore the small minorities of academic and student governors, is salutary*.

There are minor differences in board membership between Russell Group and post-92 institutions, but the similarities seem more important. The striking feature of governing bodies is the preponderance of accountants, or rather senior executives of the major accounting firm. In my sample one Russell board has four members with current or recent professional experience with the big four accountancy firms. This is not unusual; another Russell has three members similarly engaged. ‘High powered’ accountancy skills are of course useful in overseeing a £multi-million business such as a university.

However, the political and social values that go with the high-level accountancy skills are now intricately connected to external political discourse and practice: the governor who advised on the privatisation of the railways, or the advisor on the HBOS-Lloyds merger; the advisor to the government on deregulation in HR, the directors (regional or national) of the CBI. There are others: financiers, bankers, corporate lawyers, big pharma directors, entrepreneurs in a range of consultancies, a smattering of retired senior civil servants and even a lead figure in the Student Loans Company. Any concern about the impact of the REF and TEF on academic staff would be overridden by a priority to ensure that targets are delivered.

The values and ethos of the individuals who comprise the governance of universities are not left outside the boardrooms. Why would they enter governance if they did not bring with them the normative values of their competences? And such competencies, if they can be described as such, carry with them a world view of how others should be and do.

Post-92 governors are less elevated; not as many MBEs, OBEs or knighthoods as the Russell Group. And there are more public sector roles such as youth justice, charities, health service executives, housing associations, media executives and senior local government or police service officers. There are some interesting outliers in the post-92 sector with senior women executives in industry, but – albeit to a lesser extent – the bankers and senior accounting partners are still there.

The concern for diversity – there is some ethnic and gender diversity in the post-92 group, less so in the Russell Group – is diminished by the uniformity of seniority and positions of power that all board members have in the private or public sectors as CEOs, partners, and chairs of boards, with what is likely  to be a uniform ideological outlook on the world. It has been suggested that remuneration (£20K pa has been mooted by the Committee of University Chairs (CUC)) would encourage more to volunteer their time and expertise on boards of governors, but the current incumbents are similar to those great and good who always seem to have volunteered in the past; they can afford to volunteer, others will be providing the work/value while they sit on the boards.

Remuneration would be appropriate if the board members needed the money to enable them to attend board meetings. The suggested amount from the CUC is more than annual wages for many.

Halting the self-replicating nomenklatura of these boards would be difficult, requiring an external intervention to put forward board members of a different character and set of values; perhaps those who are antithetical to the interests of the Student Loans Company, to privatisation of public services and the burdens taxpayers suffered with the banking crisis of 2008. But there have been interventions on board membership before – in the 1988 Act which ended  ‘donnish dominion’, thanks to the groundwork in the Jarratt Report. Some may protest that this would be an attack on institutional autonomy, but autonomy is not an unqualified condition of the success of universities in the UK, notwithstanding the glowing report from the EUA.

The CUC code of conduct requires governors to have the interests of the HEI at heart, but governors’ perceptions, values and interests will determine assessments of current and future positions. Given the monoculture and common discipline background, there may not be enough disagreement. Such uniformity calls for more creativity in governance. The focus will be on the operational imperatives of performing well within the current context, a context of ‘academic capitalism’, with a well-known critique which may not be accessible in governance or top down management. The lineaments of such a regime are: funding via student enrolments; quality assurance regulatory systems; marketisation; the OfS regulatory framework; financial viability standards; league tables; branding and consumerisation of education.

The freedom of the market is an ideological position: the market is externally created and freedom for action and conscience is limited by the external impositions. These conditions are not only handed down by the OfS but from ‘advisory’ instructions from government on an annual basis to consider participation rates, schools links, the green agenda, grade inflation, freedom of speech (yet again), consumer rights for students, et al. The fiduciary responsibilities of governance leave little room for manoeuvre and no prospect of supererogatory action. The advisory, regulatory and the bigger socio-economic conditions, from mobility and debt aversion to the international market for students, predetermine the scope of governance.

In contrast to the UK’s HE market superstructure there is a telling edict in the EU Lisbon Treaty, which has lofty expressions of modernisation and the knowledge economy but also asks universities to contribute to the advancement of democracy. We will not have to worry about that anymore. Given the experience of many lay board members in being directly engaged in engineering the market conditions which prevail for universities it would be surprising if boards did not find a normalcy, a correctness in the prevailing conditions. The other responsibilities of governance for academic and moral matters as expected in the USA seem simply preposterous.

Beyond the need to broaden the experiential background of governors, we can also question the constitution of boards. Current expertise can be useful for audit, financial oversight and stress testing business planning (although the big four accountancy firms have had some remarkable involvement in corporate failures in the recent past), but to duplicate this at full board means a loss of opportunities for the more discursive. The current uniformity also explains why, notwithstanding the managerial links of performance to executive leadership, high levels of pay for VCs are not considered exceptional by remuneration committees – they share the same atmosphere.

Reform of governance  structures means that some of the axioms in mission statements should be considered as governance issues. If universities are ‘communities of scholars’ then why is the governance of that community in the hands of corporate accountants, financiers and directors of privatised public assets? If universities are to play a role in partnership with the local community in the civic mission then what of the governance implications with that community?

Finally, how can the academic/senate discourse connect with corporate governance? This is not simply about which will take priority: first we must ask, can they talk to each other? The simple hierarchical format of governance ‘works’ in terms of financial viability (more or less) and international status and delivery (more or less) but that should not be confused with overall efficacy. Other historical conditions contribute to the success of the HE sector – or rather, parts of the sector, as some struggle to survive in the market, or exit.

There is talk of the need to devolve managerial leadership, not always a happy experience if distant and indirect corporate performance targets give way to local bullying. Weakening governance by having the not so great and the good might not alter the dynamic of executive leadership; management might become even more powerful and autocratic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, too often, challenging and questioning the executive is rare.

The deeper problem is to disperse governance from the hierarchical to a more clustered and broader stakeholder approach. Beware the unanalysed ideological values that we all bring to bear on decision making. Let’s ditch the concept of autonomy which is a historical accident in semantic terms and begin some creative discussions on what creative governance should look like.

Reference

Sherer, M and Zakaria, I (2018) ‘Mind that gap! An investigation of gender imbalance on the governing bodies of UK universities’ Studies in Higher Education 43(4): 719-736

*I looked at 12 universities, six  Russell Group and six post-92 universities. Some governing bodies are known as Council, some have changed their title to Board of Trustees, but all have the same legal responsibilities for the institution. The Committee of Universities Chairs (CUC) has produced 3 advisory reports on remuneration of senior staff, one advisory report on Prevent, and on student’s (sic) unions.

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.


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Five stages of marketisation in English higher education policymaking

by Colin McCaig

The use of the term ‘neoliberal’ to describe the marketisation of HE systems implies a ‘grand design’ that takes a public service like HE and creates a market; however it seemed to me that this differed from a ‘free capitalist market’, nor did my understanding of the historical development of HE in England seem to reflect such a simple linearity of design. Therefore I decided a couple of years ago to really nail down what neoliberal marketisation means in the context of the English HE system. The result was The marketisation of English higher education: a policy analysis of a risk-based system, my 2018 book summarised in a paper to the SRHE Research Conference in December 2018. Employing a political discourse analysis (PDA) approach to a close reading of 16 HE policy documents over the last thirty years I identified five distinct stages of marketisation policy, reflected in arguments used to justify reform:

Stage 1: efficiency, accountability and human capital (1986-1992)

This stage was exemplified by reforms highlighted in: the Jarratt (1985) Report on university management and the Croham Report (1986) on the future of the University Grants Committee; the 1987 White Paper; the 1988 Education Reform Act; and the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. Arguments deployed included the need for ‘New Public Management’ thinking: ideas that promoted entrepreneurialism among university and polytechnic leaders. University and polytechnic boards, and the new Universities Funding Council, would henceforth include business representatives; individual academics were also encouraged to be more entrepreneurial, selling their expertise as consultants. At the same time the binary system would be unified and expanded in the hope that institutional competition would ensue, the better to meet the changing basis of demand for human capital in the knowledge economy of the future.

Stage 2: diversity as a good (1992-2000)

Policy documents during the 1990s largely celebrated and encouraged diversity and the prospects for widening participation. The new landscape of different types of institutions and modes of HE were seen as essential for expansion and lifelong learning needs. While the discourse shifted radically in some ways from stage 1, human capital needs were still to the fore – as important as social justice arguments when it came to arguing for a widening of participation. The Dearing Report (1997) encapsulated most of the debates around the future size and shape of the sector and how to fund expansion, recommending the introduction of partial fees. Commissioned by the Conservatives, it reported to an incoming Labour government wedded to social justice objectives and lifelong learning.

Stage 3: diversity becomes differentiation (2003-2010)

The major policy statements covered in this stage – the 2003 White Paper, 2004 HE Act, and the 2009 White Paper – introduced radically new arguments for a new purpose. No longer would system diversity be celebrated for its own sake, HEIs were now exhorted to differentiate their offer in the marketplace to attract applicant-consumers. Responding to institutional pressures for more funding, government introduced a variable tuition fee, on the assumption that only the most highly-demanded universities would justify the higher fee of £3,000 per annum. The policy arguments used in this stage were unusually reactive; the Russell Group and 1994 Group of universities had long lobbied for ‘top-up fees’, partly on the basis of actual costs but also because they believed they needed to be differentiated in the market from ‘other’ universities and types of HEIs. Greater centralisation paved the way for the regulatory framing for the market we see in 2019.

Stage 4: competitive differentiation (2010-15)

This stage can be seen mainly as the continuation of the implications of the previous stage – the arguments deployed in the Browne Review of HE funding and student finance (2010) and the 2011 White Paper Students at the heart of the systemdominated policy discourse. The need to have an efficient, responsive differential system reflecting a competitive fee distribution, to (roughly) match the UCAS points distribution between highly-demanded and less demanded institutions, became more critical in the era of £9,000 a year tuition fees. This decision can be seen as the key driver of virtually all policy since 2010.

Stage 5: risk and exit: the completion of the market?

The 2015 Green Paper and 2016 White Paper introduced proposals and legislative measures finally to actuate the variable tuition-fee market as envisaged as long ago as 2003. The Higher Education and Research Act introduced a single regulator for all and any HE providers – the omnipotent Office for Students (OfS) which manages, via quality oversight and funding incentives, the system of risk-based monitoring that is designed to encourage ‘exit’ for failing providers, to be replaced, if necessary, by new alternative providers encouraged in turn by lower Degree Awarding Powers and University Title barriers to market entry.

Marketisation 1986-2019: a tortured path or linear progression?

At the time of writing no providers have been allowed to fail/exit and many in the sector are in denial that government would ever allow it to happen: but that is the iron logic of the market thus constructed. Successive OfS and government statements (from OfS Chair Michael Barber, and successive Universities Ministers Sam Gyimah and Chris Skidmore) have been at pains to reassure us that they will not prop up a failing institution, defined as one that that fails to attract enough applicant-consumers willing to pay a given tuition fee. New providers, coming to market with a cheaper offer, will finally create downward pressure on (stubbornly un-differentiated) fees: ‘failing’ providers either lower their fees or risk losing students to the competition. Needless to say, none of this harms the established research-intensive ‘elite’ providers that had been lobbying for differential fees since the late 1990s.

Was all this part of a grand neoliberal design, a blueprint for marketisation? Or a collection of reactive decisions designed to ameliorate the effects of the unintended consequences of previous reforms, or indeed externalities such as the 2008 crash? Diversity and (largely unplanned) expansion certainly begat defensive differentiation among the existing (pre-1992) universities, which immediately called for the right to charge ‘top-up’ fees in the name of differentiation. Government, meanwhile, trying to widen participation for human capital as well as social justice purposes, also needing to satisfy the pre-1992s, hit upon choice for the applicant consumer in the run up to the 2003 White Paper as the mechanism that would allow applicants to see where the most highly valued HE was to be found. The Times Higher Education duly obliged with the first wave of its ‘price-list’ domestic league tables from 2005. While commercial league tables never featured in any policy statement, officially endorsed indicators of ‘quality’ such as the National Student Survey, the Destination of Leavers from HE survey and a UNISTATs website containing consumer information were all conceived at this dawning of the competitive market, all in the name of differentiating the system so that applicants could differentiate the pre-1992 ‘wheat’ from the post-1992 ‘chaff’.

The ‘end-stage’ of the market (HERA 2017) attempts to open up the system to cheap incomers that maybe, just maybe, will provide the much needed downward pressure on average tuition costs. Poorer students are exhorted to think hard about increasing their own (and public) future debt by choosing the wrong kind of HE providers: the 2016 White Paper celebrates the good access record of many ‘new providers’ and the virtues of alternatives such as apprenticeships. After twenty years of promoting the ‘graduate premium’ (first noted in the Dearing Report 1997), the White Paper points out how differentiated that benefit can be, and promises us more sophisticated evidence from tax returns (LEO data) to dissuade those with the least chance of enhancing their life though HE.

Colin McCaig is Professor of Higher Education Policy at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University He has published extensively on widening participation and system differentiation and is a political scientist by background. His book The marketisation of English Higher Education: a policy analysis of a risk-based system, was published by Emerald Publishing (ISBN: 9781787438576) in 2018


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Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Sam Gyimah MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science

Dear Minister

“Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”

If asked to sum up in a single word the direction of higher education policy from 2010 onwards, I think that many of us who try to follow Government thinking on these matters might say that the word would be “markets”. In successive White Papers and speeches, ministers have insisted that fee-paying students should see themselves as customers buying services from a university provider, which in turn should be competing with other providers in the higher education marketplace to offer the best value for money to student customers. In this way, your predecessors have argued, quality would go up and costs would come down, as happens in most markets for consumer goods. The Government has encouraged this trend by demanding that universities provide more information on which student-customers might base their purchasing decisions – most recently the TEF and the LEO data – and by encouraging new entrants into the marketplace with the aim of sharpening competition further.

Many of us in universities rather doubted that trying to create a straightforward market-type relationship between universities and their students was the best way to organise teaching and learning.  For a start, there is little evidence that students themselves want a relationship on these terms: the great majority of students surveyed in the HEPI 2018 Student Academic Experience Survey, for example, arguably preferred a pre-2004 Act, certainly a pre-2011 White Paper, funding model. I think that one reason for this – paying lower fees is no doubt another – is because they understand that in order to learn effectively they must engage with the academic life of the university in a way that is qualitatively different to, say, my engagement with Sainsbury’s when I go shopping there. Sainsbury’s does not expect its customers to help create the products which appear on its shelves; and if I’m unimpressed with them today, and I can see what Tesco are up to tomorrow. I have made no particular commitment to the Sainsbury’s way of shopping. Forgive me if this seems terribly obvious, but it has not always been clear that ministers fully appreciated this distinction.

Although many of us didn’t much like its implications, we did at least think we knew that Government saw our relationship with our students in these transactional, market-based terms. But then, Minister, along you come saying that, on the contrary, we should be in loco parentis to our students, acting (for instance) as go-betweens with their parents or guardians if we have concerns about their mental health (as reported in The Guardian, 28 June). This is not just overthrowing normal market relationships – Sainsbury’s in truth couldn’t care less about my personal well-being – it is redefining universities’ relationships with their students, and in an unhelpful way. (Having a duty of care towards both students and staff members is a different matter.) If I may say so, this has the distinct feel of political grandstanding, wanting to be seen to be acting decisively in response to – what, exactly? Of course, mental illness is desperately serious for the families and friends of those suffering from its various forms, needing the involvement of skilled professionals. A particular concern may be that suicide could result from overlooking a person’s symptoms. (Though suicide in the UK is actually a good-news story – so to speak – as ONS data show that the number of suicide deaths has been falling steadily over recent decades. Middle-aged, disadvantaged men are most likely to commit suicide – and they don’t constitute a large part of the student demographic.)

But what should be the role of a university in relation to its adult students with mental health problems? Nicola Barden writing for WonkHE on 28 June (do you read it, Minister? – you should) identifies a few of the problems which the proposed opt-in system, allowing universities to contact a student’s parents or other nominated individuals in the event of a mental health crisis, will create. Any social worker will tell you that relationships within families can be difficult in ways that outsiders can’t immediately detect: any member of university staff intruding here must be certain that they will not cause further harm – and how can they know that for sure? Imagine a situation where a parent of a student with mental health difficulties believes that the university will contact them in the event of a crisis – only for the student to have withdrawn that consent subsequently, not wanting their family to be involved. The university will then be in an impossible situation, having made commitments to both parties (as they will see it).

We’re operating, Minister, in a Government-mandated market. Universities should support their students in their academic work, but should not set themselves up to fail as substitute families. That historically never was their role; your Government’s market-focused policies have now put it completely beyond reach.

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.