Reading about the introduction of the tuition fees and the effects of marketisation on the UK’s higher education sector in some academic
literature, it would appear that a homogenous, essentially complacent –even complicit – student body largely welcomed the changes. Rob Behrens (in Abrams, 2014), the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education between 2008 and 2016, said in light of the increase to £9,000 fees: ‘I think the decision to raise the fees has had an impact on student thinking. Students do see themselves more as consumers than they used to. They want the best possible degree they can get’.
The student-as-consumer model has become almost the commonsensical
articulation of changes to English higher education since the introduction of tuition fees (Saunders, 2015). Higher education policy expects students to act as consumers, focusing on what impact this student-as-consumer has on higher education provision (Chalcraft, Hilton and Hughes, 2015; Koris, et al, 2015; Saunders, 2015). But there is remarkably little empirical evidence for a
consumer-orientation in students (Brown, 2014: Chalcraft, Hilton and
Hughes, 2015; Koris, et al, 2015; Saunders, 2015): one could argue that much of the academic polemics around the student-as-consumer is based on
anecdotal fears rather than hard fact. What is telling is how this assumption is articulated, often presenting more demanding students as driven by a
consumer-oriented approach to higher education. It may instead be that more demanding students want a more rigorous academic challenge, or perhaps, facing a competitive graduate job market they are after more to make them stand out from the crowd: it depends on what the motivations for these demands are.
In the foreword to Joanna Williams’s Consuming Higher Education (2013: i),
Professor Arthur L. Wilson explains that both he and the author have heard the phrase ‘you have to pass me, I paid for it’ from a student ‘more than once’. In her book Williams attempts to explore the trends that have constructed the student-as-consumer, citing a decline in the liberal education tradition and a new emphasis on higher education as essential for employability and, as a result, social mobility. But Williams’ work serves again as an example of how empirical evidence is lacking on whether this consumer-orientation is
widespread, with critiques often relying on the anecdotal accounts or pure polemics: though she cites interviews she has conducted for her work, there is no explanation of the methodology involved, or the criteria on which students were chosen, so I would argue that her claims that these are representative are misleading at best. It also highlights the disparaging viewpoint of students that the student-as-consumer model actively encourages. Williams (2013: 148) writes about students feeling ‘entitled’ as a result of ‘paying’ fees,
spending their time at university ‘counting contact hours or ticking off
learning outcomes’ and being adverse to taking intellectual risks. She does not question whether this may stem from a need to safeguard themselves against the larger risks – or insecurities – of the modern world, especially the world of employment, which is increasingly tied to the world of education.
What evidence there is for the student-as-consumer model is often found after examining just one university, or subject, with little attempt to chart attitudes across subjects or institutions. Daniel B. Saunders found this in his research, which tried to identify consumer-orientations in 2,674 first year
undergraduates at a public research university in the northeast United States:
While a number of scholars have discussed the pervasiveness of the conceptualisation of students as customers, to date there has been limited reliable research examining the extent to which students actually view themselves as customers. (Saunders, 2015: 5)
He concludes that the absence of such research may be symptomatic of the ways in which this orientation has become accepted within higher education: a symptom that poses interesting and potentially soul searching questions for universities. Does higher education, in anticipating that students will act like consumers, endeavour to treat them as such, perhaps in a misguided attempt to perform better in measures such as the NSS and league tables –
interpreting their demands as consumer-orientated without considering other motivations or subject positions? In short, has higher education, in expecting students to act out of consumerist motivations, decided to treat their actions as such without first establishing whether this is really the case? And if so where did such an assumption come from?
According to Rina Koris et al’s (2015: 41) study, based on a questionnaire completed by 405 business undergraduates from HEIs in Estonia, much of the existing literature on consumer-orientations in students ‘misrepresented, misinterpreted or over-generalised students’ views’. They found that while students were consumer-orientated in areas such as expecting universities to
collect and act on student feedback15 and campus facilities, they did not expect
it in the form ‘of you have to pass me, I paid for it’. They found that these
students experienced no consumer orientation towards graduation16, and
tended not to express one towards curriculum design, rigour or the pedagogy of seminar tutoring. There was some consumer-orientation in educational experiences, but by no means all, and this did not mean other motivations were not also at play. University students, Koris et al (2015: 41) found, do not expect to be ‘“served grades on silver plates” as is a none-too-seldom
assumptionamong scholars’.
If we return again to the idea of meritocracy from Chapter One, then it becomes even less surprising that students do not expect this: students who are invested in the merit discourse would instead expect to get the grades they believe their hard work deserves (or does not deserve). If they are mindful of other students as potential competitors in the graduate job market, they may additionally be mindful of their peers getting grades their work does – or does not – deserve. There is an inherent tension between the student-as-consumer model and the meritocratic competition of education, one most literature on
15 Though this could have come from a democratic, rather than a consumerist, perspective. 16 They expected graduation to require hard work, and did not expect to be handed a degree simply because they had ‘paid’ for it.
higher education does not note. It is another example of the simplistic nature of the students-as-consumer model, and how it hides some of the more
everyday effects of neoliberalism in higher education.