Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education

by Brown; Roger

• ISBN13: 9780415809801
• ISBN10: 0415809800
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2013-03-25
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The marketisation of higher education is a growing worldwide trend. Market steering is replacing or supplementing government steering. Market entry is being liberalised. Tuition fees are being introduced or increased, usually at the expense of state grants to institutions. Grants for student support are being replaced or supplemented by loans. Commercial rankings and league tables to guide student choice are proliferating. Institutions are devoting increasing resources to marketing, branding and customer service. The UK is a particularly good case, not only because it may by 2012 be the country where marketisation has proceeded furthest, but also because of the variations as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland increasingly diverge from England. There is therefore wide interest in what is happening in Britain but no recent and up to date major study that places developments here in a wider international perspective. In Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, Roger Brown argues that the competitive regime that will apply from 2012 was the logical, and possibly inevitable, outcome of a process that began with the introduction of full cost fees for overseas students in 1980. He shows how the evaluation and funding of research, the funding of student education, quality assurance, and the structure of the system have increasingly been organised on market or quasi-market lines. As well as helping to explain the evolution of British higher education over the past thirty years, the book contains some important messages about the consequences of introducing or extending market competition in universities " core activities of teaching and research.