Abstract
Sociological research has documented effectively the ways in which the higher education landscape in many parts of the world has become marketised over recent decades (e.g. Baldwin and James, 2000; Holtta et al., 2011; Naidoo et al., 2011; Slaughter and Cantwell, 2012). This has highlighted, for example, the introduction, in some countries at least, of principles of New Public Management (Deem et al., 2007; Wright and Ørberg, 2017); tuition fees (Gale and Parker, 2018; Wilkins et al., 2013); metrics encouraging institutions to compete against one another (Sabri, 2013; Tavares and Cardoso, 2013); and consumer rights legislation (Tomlinson, 2018). These developments have typically been linked to the spread of neoliberal globalisation across the Global North. While there is now plentiful evidence of the ways in which such changes have been played out at the level of policy and institutional management, we know less about their impact on the everyday lives of students. This is particularly the case with respect to non-English-speaking nations. While studies in Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK have explored how various market-led reforms (often those related to changes in funding arrangements) have affected the experiences of students (e.g. Nissen, 2019) and, in some cases, their families (e.g. Zaloom, 2019), we know less about the impact of market pressures in other parts of the world. Moreover, even in Anglophone countries, there is not always consensus among scholars. For example, writing with respect to the UK in particular, while some researchers have argued that, as a result of paying higher fees, students have taken on the identity of consumers (e.g. Molesworth et al., 2009; Nixon et al., 2018), others have shown how some students actively resist such an identity, believing that it undermines the two-way nature of learning and their role as an active contributor to their own education (Tomlinson, 2017).
Our aim in putting together this special section has been to build upon these debates, to provide a fuller understanding of the various ways in which marketisation has affected the lives of students themselves, and how these influences are understood by others. The articles that make up the section explore empirically different dimensions of being a student – including their political activity (Raaper), study practices (Ulriksen and Nejrup), and relationships with staff (Gretzky and Lerner) – and how these have been reconfigured through the introduction of various market mechanisms. They also consider the extent to which marketisation has informed media representations of students (Silverio et al.). Moreover, we have sought to expand the geographical reach of this body of scholarship through focussing on a range of national contexts – England, Denmark, Spain, Israel, and China. In so doing, the special section highlights how the ways in which marketisation is perceived and experienced are closely linked to national context. For example, Jayadeva et al. describe how in Spain, staff and students experienced higher education as having been significantly transformed by marketisation in large part due to the manner in which the private cost of higher education is paid for by students in the country; dissatisfaction with the quality of education and pessimism about the labour market outcomes of having a degree in Spain; and the fact that marketisation is relatively less firmly established in the higher education system of Spain and therefore less normalised. Likewise, Yu discusses how students studying at a transnational China–UK cooperative university in Ningbo expressed disappointment with what they perceived to be their institution’s ‘consumerist approach’, but attributed this to what they viewed as a ‘utilitarian culture’ characteristic of China – because they viewed the British higher education system as superior and free of such neoliberal imperatives. In this way, the special section shows how, while marketisation has many common elements across nation-states, it is often spatially differentiated – and not always experienced in the same way by students across the world.
All six articles in the special section are based on papers that were originally given as part of a conference titled ‘Students in Changing Higher Education Landscapes’ that was held at the University of Surrey, UK, in June 2019. In exploring the lives of higher education students within marketised higher education sectors, we hope that the articles will be of particular interest to sociologists of education and scholars in the area of youth studies. However, we anticipate that they will also have a considerably broader appeal, given that many readers of Sociological Research Online will be engaged in teaching students, and thus have a professional interest in the debates with which we will engage.