Marchandisation

The Professor and the Market - Can higher education build real market-feedback mechanisms?

By Alejandro Crawford. In his inaugural address last September, Dartmouth College President Philip J. Hanlon emphasized that “we must fully harness the power of experiential learning – learning by doing.” Such learning, which challenges students to test their ideas in practice and refine them in light of experience, is a major emphasis at leading institutions of higher education today. As rates of economic disruption have accelerated, the ability to derive solutions for which there is no existing formula has become a survival skill for many careers. In the face of this, top global programs have intensified their emphasis on experiential education as a bet on future rankings and leadership. More...

Global EdTech spending forecast to increase to over 14 bn Euros in the next 5 years

British Universities Turn to Capital Markets

By Patrick Blum. Facing government funding cuts and sharp spending increases, some British universities are turning to a new source of money — the bond market. 
English universities and colleges in particular are set to raise their infrastructure spending to 3.86 billion pounds, or $6.5 billion, this academic year, from £2.65 billion in 2012-13, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the public sector paymaster for the sector, said last month. They plan to invest £3.3 billion a year for the next three years to improve their facilities. More...

ConnectEDU Sells CoursEval to Venture-Capital Firm

Creating a quasi-market in higher education in Australia

By Margaret Gardner. The introduction of the demand-driven system for undergraduate places in 2012 saw the differences between the government regulated world of public universities and the market-driven world of international and postgraduate education diminish. With the federal budget that difference has almost disappeared. In the demand-driven system, domestic students wanting to attend university can choose which university and which program they wish to take, subject to meeting the entry criteria. The government will now extend this open access to diploma and associate degree places. Access to government funding for these undergraduate and sub-degree places will be extended to non-university higher education providers both public and private. As a result, Australia’s public universities will now operate in what can be described as a quasi-market, rather than as public universities funded by federal government. More...

Universities becoming ‘industry’ instead of ‘education’

By Seo Young-ji. “I reject a university where injustice is rampant.” It was the afternoon of May 7, and a university student was shouting at the main gate of Chung-Ang University in Seoul’s Heukseok neighborhood. The university has undergone rapid restructuring since it was acquired by the Doosan Group in 2008. Now it has begun making “incursions” into areas that have hitherto been up to the students themselves to decide. Students who have criticized the moves have reportedly been stigmatized and repressed. For Kim Chang-in, a 24-year-old third-year philosophy student, dropping out was a last-ditch show of resistance. More...

There’s still no such thing as a higher education market

The Wal-Mart-ization of higher education: How young professors are getting screwed

By Keith Hoeller. More and more faculty at America's colleges and universities are underpaid and undervalued. Can that change?
In 2009, Money Magazine published a survey titled “The 50 Best Jobs in America.”  Their reporters analyzed job data and conducted an online survey of thirty-five thousand people, taking into account such factors as salaries, flexibility, benefit to society, satisfaction, stress, job security, and growth prospects. The proverbial college professor sat high on the list at No. 3, with a median salary of $70,400 for nine months’ work, top pay of $115,000, and a ten-year growth prospect of 23 percent. College teaching earned “A” grades for flexibility, benefit to society, and satisfaction, and a “B” for job stress, with 59 percent of surveyed professors reporting low stress. More...

Higher education in 2013: the year of marketisation – but to what extent?

By Gill Wyness. Gill Wyness looks at the successes and failures of policy and why there will never be a free market in higher education. This year has been a significant one for UK higher education, with the government rapidly moving the system away from a state-controlled sector towards a more marketised structure – to the applause of some and the growing malaise of others. It culminated in the surprise removal of the long-standing student number controls, freeing up universities to recruit as many students as they wish. This comes 50 years after the anniversary of Lord Robbins' seminal report on the expansion of higher education, with its vision that "courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so." More...

Why higher education will not benefit from market forces

By Peter Scott. If we have more of a market in higher education, brands will become more important, says Peter Scott – to the detriment of diversity. The trouble with "markets" in higher education is that most of the people designing them haven't a clue about real markets. With few exceptions, ministers, civil servants, quangocrats and senior university managers have all spent their careers in the very public sector they seem determined to subvert. Read more...