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According to Giroux (2002), Kuh (1999), Roberts (1999), and Saunders (2007, 2010) a manifestation of the rise of neoliberal ideology is that university students will increasingly employ calculative and instrumental decision making processes in their selection of university study. It is argued that university students will increasingly opt for profitable vocationally orientated study paths over the less vocationally orientated study paths found in the humanities and liberal arts. For these critics this shift occurs due to neoliberalism’s construction of the neoliberal subject position.

Within Rose’s (1999) highly influential work analysing the nature and effects of neoliberalism the main argument is that prominent organisations and nation states are attempting to advocate, through a variety of strategies, a new dominant subject position; the neoliberal subject. The neoliberal subject is characterised above all else by an attendance to rational decision making especially in regards to economic self-interest;

All manner of social undertakings – health, welfare, education, insurance – can be reconstrued in terms of their contribution to the development of human capital. Their internal organization can be reshaped in enterprise form. And the paths chosen by rational and enterprising individuals can be shaped by acting upon the external contingencies that are factored into

calculations. The notion of enterprise thus entails a distinct conception of the human actor – no longer the nineteenth-century economic subject of interests but an entrepreneur of his or her self. (Rose, 1999, pp. 141 – 142)

This emphasis on economic rationalism within the neoliberal subjects overrides and replaces the previously held distinction between the domain of economics, and the domain of the non- economic. Culture, social mores, civic responsibility, personal ethics, and even morality are superseded by the amoral exchange of the market. In regards to education the consequences are obvious;

Education is no longer confined to ‘schooling’, with its specialized institutional sites and discrete biographical locus. The disciplinary individualization and normalization of the school sought to install, once and for all, the capacities and competencies for social citizenship. But a new set of educational obligations are emerging that are not confined in space and time in the same ways. The new citizen is required to engage in a ceaseless work of training and retraining, skilling and reskilling, enhancement of credentials and preparation for a life of incessant job seeking: life is to become a continuous economic capitalization of the self (Rose, 1999, pp. 160 – 161)

For the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject the role of education, especially post-compulsory education, is to acquire those skills and credentials which will allow the subject to profit. The notion of learning for interest, or personal growth, is wholly replaced by instrumental, vocational, functions of education (Rose, 1999).

This notion that a feature of neoliberal governance is the construction of the entrepreneurial subject is echoed throughout discussions on neoliberalism. For Brown (2003) the neoliberal subject is defined by an adherence to economic rationalism as the basis for decision making; “The extension of market rationality to every sphere, and especially the reduction of moral and political judgement to a cost/benefit calculus” (p. 16). As with Rose (1999), Brown (2003) argues that for the neoliberal subject economic rationalism supersedes all other factors in decision making and is applied calculatedly to all aspects of life;

The political sphere, along with every other dimension of contemporary existence, is submitted to an economic rationality, or put the other way around, not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo economicus, all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality. While this entails submitting every action and policy to considerations of profitability, equally important is the production of all human and institutional action as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of utility, benefit, or satisfaction against a micro- economic grid of scarcity, supply and demand, and moral value-neutrality. (Brown, 2003, p. 15)

While Rose (1999) presents the notion of the neoliberal subject as a not yet realised ideal for neoliberal governance, something of a work in progress, Brown (2003) argues that this subject position has already been realised, and points towards the university as evidence;

Other evidence for progress in the development of such a [neoliberal] citizenry is not far from hand: consider the market rationality permeating universities today, from admissions and recruiting to the relentless consumer mentality of students in relationship to university brand names, courses, and services (Brown, 2003, p. 15).

The notion that neoliberalism constructs the self-interested neoliberal subject is not limited to Rose’s (1999) analysis of the United Kingdom, or Brown’s (2003) analysis of the United States. Drawing heavily on the preceding authors Davies and Bansel (2007) argue that within New Zealand and Australia neoliberal reforms have produced economically rationalist, highly entrepreneurial subjects;

The belief that the market should direct the fate of human beings (rather than that human beings should direct the economy) has come to seem, through the installation and operationalization of neoliberal discourses and practices, a natural, normal and desirable condition of humankind (p. 253)

For Davies and Bansel (2007) the education sector in New Zealand and Australia is not only a site which is affected by neoliberal ideologies through reforms in funding, and changes in how staff are managed. The university is also seen as an engine for the inculcation of neoliberal ideologies in young people which produces the economically centred neoliberal subject; “Schools and universities have arguably been reconfigured to produce the highly

individualized, responsibilized subjects who have become entrepreneurial actors across all dimensions of their lives” (Davies & Bansel, 2007, p. 248).

Yet however popular the notion of the contemporary university student as becoming increasingly motivated by economic motivations in their decision making processes is, this belief is not supported by the longitudinal analysis of enrolment data which shows that enrolments in non-vocational liberal arts papers has increased between the years 2001 to 2010. This assertion is also not supported by a body of literature concerning how and why contemporary students choose the nature of their higher education.