Student Agreements and Student Consumers:The Marketization of Learning and the Erosion of Higher Education as a Public Good

The restructuring of higher education according to neo-liberal market principles has constructed the student consumer as a social category, thereby altering the nature, purpose and values of higher education. In the United Kingdom, a key government attempt to champion the rights of the student consumer has taken the form of institutional charters which indicate the level of services students can expect to receive and what they will be expected to do in return. Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework is applied to analyse dynamics of practice in universities, paying particular attention to the impact on students and learning processes, and on the academic practices of faculty. By studying the production of institutional information created to enhance the workings of the market, we suggest a particular image of higher education is promoted to prospective students which simultaneously regulates current student expectations. We argue that the balance of the concept of higher education as a public and private good is reconstructed according to the changed social, economic and political environment. We conclude that a focus on consumerism places externally-driven instrumental aims upon universities which, in turn, reinforce current notions of education as a private investment.