Abstract
This chapter describes how the theory of markets has been applied to the provision of British (and particularly English) higher education since 1980. It concludes with an outline of Neoliberal beliefs as further background for the rest of the book.
Where effective competition can be created, it is a better means of guiding individual efforts than any other (Hayek, 1944: 27, quoted in Marginson, 2004: 207).
Unleashing the forces of consumerism is the best single way we’ve got of restoring high academic standards (David Willetts, Minister for Higher Education, quoted in Morgan, 2012).
More than mere economic policy, neoliberalism is a governing social and political rationality that submits all human activities, values, institutions, and practices to market principles. It formulates everything in terms of capital investment and appreciation (including and especially humans themselves), whether a teenager building a resume for college, a twenty-something seeking a mate, a working mother returning to school, or a corporation buying carbon offsets. As a governing rationality, neoliberalism extends from the management of the state itself to the soul of the subject; it renders health, education, transportation, nature, and art into individual consumer goods, and converts patients, students, drivers, athletes, and museum-goers alike into entrepreneurs of their own needs and desires who consume or invest in those goods (Brown, W. 2011a: 118).
The central defining characteristic of all neoliberal technique is its hostility to the ambiguity of political discourse, and a commitment to the explicitness and transparency of quantitative, economic indicators, of which the market price system is the model. Neoliberalism is the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics (Davies, 2014: 4, original author’s emphasis).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In a recent (2021) paper, Nancy MacLean shows how Friedman’s efforts to privatise education (to which state-funded vouchers were an end) buttressed efforts in the South to resist the desegregation of schools that followed the Supreme Court’s judgement in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
- 2.
It should be noted that 6–9 have not been applied, or have been only partially applied, in Scotland (Bruce, 2016).
- 3.
The Government has recently announced plans to change the loan terms to reduce the shortfall (Department for Education, 2022). The changes will take the loans system closer to a ‘graduate tax’ (Barr, 2009). In spite of the Government’s professed belief in expanding access from low-income households, the new arrangements are seriously regressive. Low- to middle-income graduates could be made about £20,000 worse off over their lifetime whilst the highest earners could be £25,000 better off (Johnson, P. 2022).
- 4.
Retrieved 2 January 2022 from https://www.gov.uk/check-university-award-degree-recognised-bodies.
- 5.
There has over time been a shift in the balance of regulation in higher education away from self-regulation to regulation by the state and the market (Brown, R. 2004, 2018). This has culminated for the moment in proposals by the Office for Students (January 2022) for all institutions to be judged by ‘minimum acceptable outcomes’. As we shall see later (Chap. 7), this inconsistency between Neoliberal theory about the role of the state and Neoliberal governing practice is by no means confined to higher education.
- 6.
As described in Brown with Carasso (2013: 41–70), since 1987 direct government funding of university research has reflected periodic quality assessments: initially the Research Assessment Exercise, now the Research Excellence Framework. Over time this funding has become increasingly concentrated so that a small handful of (generally, long-established) institutions (mostly in London and the South East) receives a high proportion of the total.
- 7.
Although successive governments have directed their fire at the leading universities’ admissions procedures, the fundamental cause is socioeconomic inequality and its reflection in school and college provision: the opportunities and support for students and their families. This goes far wider than the fact that the private schools continue to send disproportionate numbers of students to Oxford and Cambridge and other ‘top’ universities. Brian Barry’s summary remains as accurate now as when it was first published:
Whereas a socially just education system would minimise the effects on children’s opportunities of their parents’ social and economic position, the current set-up in Britain operates at every point to expand the advantages of parents with education, money and high aspirations. “School choice” is just the final straw, in which the effects of parental advantages and disadvantages are multiplied by placing an enormous premium on know-how and resources (Barry, 2005: 66; see also, Dorling, 2018).
- 8.
Institutions also put enormous effort into manipulating and massaging the statistics that underlie the various performance ‘league tables’. As Davies (2020: 18) says: ‘Under neoliberal conditions, all action becomes dictated by a single question … what will this mean for my ratings?’ For the enhanced pursuit of status under Neoliberalism, see Storr (2021).
- 9.
For the ‘economic ideology of higher education’, see Salter and Tapper (1994).
- 10.
In his account of the historical origins of Neoliberalism, Slobodian (2018: 102) quotes Robbins as saying ‘shared precarity should be the foundation of world unity’. Precarity is a continuing Neoliberal trope. George Monbiot (2020) quotes Peter Hargreaves, a billionaire who donated £3.2 m to the Brexit Leave campaign, as explaining that, after Brexit, ‘We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic’. Recent research at the Nuffield Political Centre (Green and de Geus, 2022) suggests that economic insecurity is as much of a dividing line between voters as age and level of education.
- 11.
Retrieved 2 January 2022 from https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/graduate-outcomes-leo-provider-level-data.
- 12.
- 13.
The Laffer Curve is a theory devised by the US economist Arthur Laffer that purports to demonstrate that, counter-intuitively, tax revenues increase as tax rates reduce. However, there is plenty of evidence that it is flawed (e.g., Piketty et al., 2011).
References
Adams, J. (2021, November 24). England’s most prestigious universities failing to boost social mobility, IFS finds. The Guardian on-line. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/24/englands-most-prestigious-universities-failing-to-boost-social-mobiliyt-ifs-finds
Barr, N. (2009, March 24). A graduate tax is for life, not just for a few years. The Guardian.
Barry, B. (2005). Why social justice matters. Polity.
Branch, J. D., & Christiansen, B. (2021). The marketisation of higher education: Concepts, cases and criticisms. Palgrave Macmillan.
Brown, R. (2004). Quality assurance in higher education: The UK experience since 2004. Routledge Falmer.
Brown, W. (2011a). Neoliberalized knowledge. History of the Present, 1(1), 113–129.
Brown, R. (Ed.). (2011b). Higher education and the market. Routledge.
Brown, R. (2012). The myth of student choice. University of West London Institute for Teaching, Innovation and Learning Annual Lecture 5th December.
Brown, R. (2014). The real crisis in higher education. Higher Education Review, 46(3), 4–25.
Brown, R. (2018). Changing patterns of accountability in the UK – From QA to TEF. In E. Hazelkorn, A. C. McCormick, & H. Coates (Eds.), Research handbook on quality, performance and accountability in higher education (pp. 457–471). Edward Elgar.
Brown, R., & Carasso, H. (2013). Everything for sale? The marketisation of UK higher education. Routledge.
Bruce, A. (2016). Scotland and the higher education market. In P. John & J. Fanghangel (Eds.), Dimensions of marketisation in higher education (pp. 57–66). Routledge.
Committee on Higher Education. (1963). Higher Education. HMSO.
Coyle, D. (2020). Markets, state and people: Economics for public policy. Princeton University Press.
Davies, W. (2014). The limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition. Sage.
Davies, W. (2020). This is not normal: The collapse of liberal Britain. Verso.
Department for Education. (2022, February 24). Fairer higher education system for students and taxpayers. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fairer-higher-education-system-for-students-and-taxpayers.
Department of Education and Science. (1985). Higher Education into the 1990s Cmnd 9524. HMSO
Dorling, D. (2018). Peak inequality: Britain’s ticking time bomb. Policy Press.
Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago University Press.
Green, R., & de Geus, R. (2022). Red wall, red herring? Nuffield Political Research Centre.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Hayek, F. (1944). The road to Serfdom. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Institute for Fiscal Studies. (2021). Which university degrees are best for intergenerational mobility? Institute for Fiscal Studies. https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/Which-university-degrees-are-best-for-intergenerational-mobility.pdf.
Johnson, P. (2022, February 28). Changes to university fees are set to penalise lower-earning graduates. The Times.
Le Grand, J., & Bartlett, W. (1993). Quasi-markets and social policy. Macmillan.
Marginson, S. (2004). Australian higher education: National and global markets. In P. N. Teixeira, B. Jongbloed, D. Dill, & A. Amaral (Eds.), Markets in higher education: Rhetoric or reality? (pp. 207–240). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Monbiot, G. (2020, November 25). There is a civil war in capitalism and we’re the collateral damage. The Guardian Journal.
Morgan, J. (2012, October 11). Wake up to the new world, declares Willetts. Times Higher Education.
Newfield, C. (2011). Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle class. Harvard University Press.
Peters, C. (1982, September 5). A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto. The Washington Post.
Piketty, T., Saez, E., & Stantcheva, S. (2011, December 8). Taxing the 1%: Why the top tax rate could be over 80%. VoxEU.org. https://voxeu.org/article/taxing-1-why-top-tax-rate-could-be-over-80.
Salter, B., & Tapper, T. (1994). The state and higher education. Woburn Press.
Slobodian, Q. (2018). Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press.
Storr, W. (2021). The status game: On social status and how we use it. William Collins.
Treanor, P. (2009). Neoliberalism: Origins, theory, definition. Retrieved November 22, 2017, from http://web.inter.nl/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html.
Trow, M. (1992). Aspects of quality in higher education. Paper prepared for a conference Quality and the Renewal of Higher Education, Stockholm, 12–13 March.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, R. (2022). Markets in Higher Education. In: The Conservative Counter-Revolution in Britain and America 1980-2020. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09142-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09142-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-09141-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-09142-1
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)