By Alice Philipson. A rise in tuition fees has fuelled an increase in yobbish behaviour by Oxford students because they feel "more like customers" now, locals have claimed.
Residents say the new intake of students this autumn at Oxford Brookes University has sparked the worst noise and anti-social behaviour for years. Many have complained about drunken, slurring students being sick and urinating outside their houses, and couples sneaking into gardens to have sex. More...
By Herman Berliner. In my last blog, I noted my high regard for the ratings and more importantly the objectivity of Consumer Reports. But there are so many goods and services not ranked by Consumer Reports or any other objective judge that in many cases we are left to our own improvised rankings or, and even worse, questionable third party judgments. I have for many years used my own ratings system for rankings of hotels. Within a particular star category, I judge a hotel by the orange juice available at breakfast. If the juice tastes like it comes from watered down concentrate, I immediately downgrade the hotel; if the orange juice tastes fresh squeezed, the hotel rises in my opinion. Bathrooms are also often good proxies for the quality of a hotel. In a recent trip, the bathroom provided was so small that even my 15 pound dog would find the accommodations tight. Chocolate on the pillow, on the other hand, has turned out not to be a good proxy for hotel quality, though I do believe that providing chocolate mints is a good indication that the provider doesn’t understand and appreciate the richness and quality of chocolate. Read more...
By Chris Parr. 'Grade grubbing' may be on increase as student entitlement grows in high-fees era. How often have you handed a freshly marked paper back to an expectant student only for their face to drop as they realise they have not been awarded the grade they expected? And how often has that student then pursued you to your office, teary-eyed, to plead with you to change the grade, or to add a few marks on the sly?
In this post, dr Joanna Williams from University of Kent (UK) argues that there is a complex process by which students adopt a consumer perspective to higher education, and it is not merely tuition fees that contribute to this. The entry draws on her recent book "Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t Be Bought", London: Bloomsbury.
Recent news reports suggest the true cost of a university education for English students may be close to £100,000. It is perhaps not surprising then that students are increasingly described as ‘consumers’ of higher education (HE) (see Brown: 2011 and Molesworth, Nixon and Scullion: 2011). In Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t Be Bought I argue that the payment of university tuition fees (currently £9000 each year for English students) is a symptom rather than a cause of students being considered as consumers. Students are constructed as consumers both before entering HE and while at university by a range of government policies and institutional practices, many of which pre-date tuition fees paid by individual students. Indeed, students were first referred to as ‘customers’ of HE in government publicity in 1993, five years before they were required to pay any fees at all (see the Conservative government’s 1993 Charter for Higher Education).
Students are constructed as consumers from the moment they first begin to think about attending university. Government-sponsored websites offering guidance to school children present university as mainly concerned with future employment and material reward: ‘Higher education could boost your career prospects and earning potential … on average, graduates tend to earn substantially more … Projected over a working lifetime, the difference is something like £100,000’. The government’s perception of the benefit of HE emerges clearly: it is to enable youngsters to get a job and earn money. Education is presented as an essentially private investment from which material rewards can be accrued. The ‘good consumer’ will shop around to choose the university that will most efficiently yield the highest return on their investment. Read more...
This is a guest post by John Lea, a principal lecturer in education at Canterbury Christ Church University, in Britain, and author of Political Correctness and Higher Education: British and American Perspectives (Taylor & Francis, 2009). John Cleese once said that the main difference between Britain and the United States was that Americans understood customer service. This difference was behind the creation of his classic character, Basil Fawlty. Of course, believing that the customer is always right and keeping the customer satisfied are not straightforward matters, particularly when that customer is a student. The idea of the student as a customer has been given new impetus in Britain by a government push toward an American-style marketization of higher education. In September, the first students arrived on campus who will be expected to pay (in many cases) the full possible cost of their university education—up to 9,000 pounds per year (roughly $14,000).
The news that Louis Vuitton stores in Hong Kong briefly ran out of stock as a result of mainland Chinese demand should remind us that not all parts of the world are mired in economic problems. Indeed the fortunes of luxury brands have continued to prosper because a consumer boom has held up so well in parts of the world where the economy seems to continue to grow inexorably. But consumption is not just a corollary of economic growth. It is a rich and variegated landscape of rights and obligations and it is no wonder that the academic literature on consumption has come on apace over the last 30 years, since the days when it was largely the preserve of economics and economic history (a good starting point is the recently published Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies)./https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
