The profit motive is threatening higher education

By Richard Hall. An architecture is opening up that threatens the public funding, regulation and governance of higher education.
The profitability of higher education partnerships for companies like Pearson Education highlights how educational technology is developed as a way in, both to the extraction of value from universities, and to the recalibration of the purpose of universities to catalyse such extraction further.
Partnerships and leverage are enforced, in part, because academic labour is shackled inside the demands of performance revealed in research evaluations or student satisfaction scores. Engaging with external partners like Pearson for service-driven efficiencies makes sense for universities that are being recalibrated as businesses.
In June 2012 David Willetts, the UK universities and science minister, was reported to have made an appeal to private investors to support overseas expansion of UK universities and to have said that Goldman Sachs was “keen to investigate this possibility”. More...