Students as Consumers: Commodifying or Democratising Learning?

Abstract

Abstract

The positioning of students as ‘consumers’ of education is becoming a global phenomenon. This paper begins by drawing on insights from both the marketing and education literatures to assess the impact of this development on the processes and outcomes of education, on the professional practices of faculty and on widening participation. Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework is then applied to analyse how consumer mechanisms are mediated by the organisational cultures and practices within universities. These theoretical insights are combined with data from different national contexts to identify both positive and negative aspects of this trend. The paper goes on to consider the critique of consumerism as something that promotes commodification and passive learning. Some other ways of empowering students more actively in their learning, including ‘student voice’ and ‘co-production’ initiatives that are currently fashionable in Western policy contexts, are then discussed. While these are seen by some commentators as examples of ‘pre-figurative democratic practice’, others have identified them as having the potential to alienate students through tokenistic provision or as serving a neo-liberal policy agenda through the ‘responsibilisation’ of students. The paper concludes by suggesting that such initiatives may have the potential to challenge academic complacency without undermining core academic values.

Introduction 2

This paper explores how the increasing emphasis on students as ‘consumers’ in the higher education market place has arisen and how it has impacted on teachers and learners in universities. It goes on to consider whether other approaches may be more compatible with what we know about the characteristics of high quality learning, while recognising that ‘quality’ in higher education remains a highly contested concept. 3

In recent years, the ascendance of market mechanisms in higher-education systems worldwide has led to the conceptualisation of students as consumers (or customers) of higher education. 4 The ‘student as consumer’ discourse gained prominence in the USA in the 1970s when the Nixon administration introduced various competitive mechanisms which led to a rise in tuition fees as well as an enhancement of aid policy through which students, rather than institutions, gained funding from the government. 5 The UK was the first major country in Europe to adopt quasi-market mechanisms and consumerist discourses. Rationales for these shifts were linked to market competition and tuition fees, the modernisation of the public sector agenda which was intended to break ‘producer capture’, and an attempt to maintain quality as higher education moved from an elite to a mass system. 6

David Willetts, the current Minister for Universities and Science in the UK, has championed the conception of students as consumers for many years, 7 and this has now been reflected in legislation to increase tuition fees in the light of a government commissioned enquiry into university funding and student finance. 8 A subsequent policy paper produced by the government was entitled Higher Education: students at the heart of the system. 9 In Australia, the late 1980s heralded an intense form of competition between institutions for domestic and international students, and universities were expected to transform themselves into customer-focused business enterprises. 10 In much of continental Europe, the shift towards forms of market competition has been slower, although discernible patterns are emerging with the development of a common European Higher Education Area and the Bologna reforms, which may be seen as an attempt to increase Europe’s overall market share of higher education. 11

While the implementation of policies relating to markets and consumers has taken different forms across various countries, depending on, among other factors, the history and structure of national higher-education systems as well as differing systems of macro- and meso-governance, there is general agreement that there is a global trend towards consumerism worldwide. The rise of the student consumer in higher education is part of a global trend away from the discourses, funding and governance arrangements based on the ‘social compact’ that evolved in many countries between higher education, the state and society over the last century. 12 These developments, together with more general retractions away from frameworks based on Keynesian settlements, have resulted in the implementation of funding and regulatory frameworks based on neo-liberal market mechanisms and new managerialist principles. 13 Such frameworks are based on the assumption that public higher-education systems have become too large and complex for governments to fund on their own, that market competition within and between universities will create more efficient and effective institutions, and that management principles derived from the private sector which monitor, measure, compare, and judge professional activities will enhance higher-education functioning. At the same time, state regulation has not decreased. Instead, we find increasing articulation between state and market forms of co-ordination. Governments create the conditions for a quasi-market, and at the same time market mechanisms are deployed to achieve governmental goals. 14

However, in most countries until relatively recently, public higher-education systems have been largely state-funded, and regulated and shielded from the direct pressures of market forces. Indeed, in some ways, public higher-education institutions have traditionally encompassed professional cultures which have been antithetical to market principles and cultures of a neo-liberal variety. 15

Making Sense of the Dynamics of Higher Education

Bourdieu’s work on higher education as a specific institutional site has made an important contribution to understanding the dynamics of practice within higher-education institutions. His framework can be located in the wider literature on frameworks of consumption which link markets, culture, and ideology in dynamic relationships. 16 Bourdieu’s ‘field’ concept has received attention in management studies through the work of the new institutionalists who have developed the concept to depict a group of organisations within a common institutional framework held together by regulation, cognitive belief systems, and normative rules, and which compete for legitimacy and resources. 17

Although Bourdieu’s work on higher education has been developed in the context of France, the application of his concepts to other national contexts indicates the significant contribution his work can make to the study of higher education in general (see, for example, Naidoo, 2004; Tomusk, 2000). 18 Taking his three key concepts of ‘field’, ‘capital’, and ‘habitus’ together, practice in the field of higher education is shaped by an academic habitus that engenders in individuals a ‘disposition’ to act or think in certain ways; and on the network of objective relations between positions that individuals or institutions occupy in the field. The operation of a general academic habitus across different national contexts has been confirmed by empirical studies in various national contexts and time periods. 19 Individuals and institutions implement strategies in order to improve or defend their positions in the field in a competition that has historically been relatively autonomous from economic forces but which nevertheless consists of deeply ingrained rules, values, and professional protocols. 20

Bourdieu argues that in the context of elite systems of higher education, there was also a close relationship between student and faculty habitus which contributed to social reproduction and the legitimation of privilege. Through acts of subjective and objective selection, universities selected those students richest in inherited cultural capital who originated from dominant positions in society and who were themselves predisposed to enter higher education and fed them back into dominant positions in society. 21 In the contemporary period of mass higher education, we would argue that the contribution of higher education to social reproduction also occurs through the hierarchical structuring of the field of higher education through which there is a strong correlation between institutional status and student disadvantage. 22 In this sense, the structuring of the field of higher education, while establishing internal homogeneity in terms of social origin and disposition within each institution, establishes stark differences in social origin and disposition between the student populations in institutions positioned at different levels of relative hierarchy within the institutional field.

Having established the historically constituted mode of social practice occurring in higher education, we now turn to the impact of consumerist mechanisms. Contemporary conditions and policies have led to the weakening of the boundary between the field of higher education and the external context. In particular, economic forces impact more powerfully and directly on universities than in previous decades. In addition, changes in funding policy that require institutions to generate surplus income have led to the undermining of academic and scientific capital. 23 Higher education has therefore become more open to forces for commodification, while education has developed into a product and process specifically for its ‘exchange’ rather than for its intrinsic ‘use’ value. The marketisation of higher education and the re-conceptualisation of students as consumers therefore impact on universities by potentially altering the nature of rewards and sanctions operating in higher education. There are pressures for success to be measured by income generation; the number of student customers captured, the extent of involvement with commercial interests, and the degree of financial surplus created rather than on principles for the accumulation of academic or scientific capital. This ‘devalorisation’ of academic capital is therefore likely to challenge the underlying logic and values shaping academic practices.

While all universities will be influenced by consumerist mechanisms, their position in the field of university education will determine how quickly and to what degree the former penetrate and restructure core university cultures and practices. Universities that are in the upper levels of the hierarchy with high levels of scientific capital are likely to be predisposed to attempt to draw on superior resources to delay, minimise, or restructure forces for consumerism. However, these universities are not able to remain entirely immune to these forces over extended periods of time. Such actions, according to Bourdieu, function as an institutional strategy to conserve the academic principles structuring the field that maintain these institutions in dominant positions. Institutions that are in lower positions in the hierarchy are less likely to have the resources or the disposition to exclude forces for consumerism, particularly since such forces have the potential to undermine the academic principles that structure the field in hierarchy. These institutions are therefore likely to experience consumerism in pristine form. The initial refusal of Oxford and Cambridge to participate in a national survey of student satisfaction (see below) in the UK reflects this pattern of elite institutions delaying the onset of the consumerist turn.

Empowered Student Consumers?

Nevertheless, one of the aspirations of government policy in higher education in the UK and elsewhere is for students to become empowered consumers who gain influence over the education process and thereby enhance their own learning. So far most of the policies and much of the critical literature on students as consumers have focused on how students make choices about what universities and courses they will seek to attend. 24 There has been less emphasis so far on how the market affects the nature of students’ engagement in their own learning. This will be the focus of the current paper and we will return to this issue after considering what we know about choice of institutions and courses.

Contemporary students often have greater opportunities than previous generations of students to choose between courses and universities. As well as a significant increase in the numbers of institutions, choices between and within universities have been facilitated by the modularisation of the curriculum and the assignment of uniform levels and credits to courses to facilitate movement. 25 Greater opportunities for cross-national mobility in Europe has also been introduced by the Bologna process which aims to develop a common framework of higher-education qualifications across different countries in order to facilitate cross border higher education. Students also have greater access to information. Universities in many countries are required by statutory bodies to publish information on academic programmes so that students can be assured of what they are to receive at the outset of their studies. In addition, performance indicators including throughput rates, academic and social facilities, and widening participation measures have been developed by statutory bodies. These are complemented by (often contentious) national and global league tables measuring various dimensions of university performance. 26

An important recent development is the introduction of instruments through which students indicate the level of ‘customer satisfaction’ of their courses. The Course Experience Questionnaire is used as the national instrument in Australia while the National Survey of Student Engagement is used in the USA. The National Student Survey (NSS) through which final year undergraduate students are asked to evaluate their courses is used in England. The results of such surveys are made publicly available in order to inform the choice of intending applicants. The European Commission has subsequently funded a consortium of leading European higher-education institutions to develop its own ranking system for higher-education institutions in order to support students’ decisions. This rankings system is multi-dimensional and compares similar institutions in relation to research, teaching and learning, and other aspects of university performance. 27 In addition, consumer rights have been strengthened by the elaboration and institutionalisation of complaints and redress mechanisms 28 including the appointment of university ombudsmen.

All of the mechanisms noted above are important levers with the potential to empower student as consumers. There is greater information on course aims and course content, and greater transparency in relation to criteria and methods for assessment. There are also indications that league tables are increasingly used in the decision-making of students. This is particularly true for younger applicants of high academic achievement and social class, and for many groups of international students, but less true for applicants who are mature, vocationally oriented, or from less advantaged backgrounds. 29 Mechanisms such as student-satisfaction surveys do not merely give students more information on which to base their choices but the subsequent public availability of such information empowers students to control, and indeed counteract, some elements of the communication process in order to affect the way in which other consumers perceive individual universities. In this way, universities are drawn into an interaction with students through which students can apply pressure on institutions to take actions that would not normally be taken. In the UK, there are indications that new institutional initiatives are arising in response to NSS results.

However, it has also been argued that, while governments’ assumptions of student behaviour place great weight on the consumer being able to make informed choices, students do not necessarily have the tools to retrieve such information. 30 Research findings on consumer confusion 31 can be readily applied to higher education. As Drummond notes, the expansion of higher education, cross-border education, competition, and the rise of marketing activity within the sector have led to increased information from multiple sources, a high rate of product proliferation, increasing use of imitation strategies, and consumer shopping in alien markets. 32 The possibility of sub-optimum decisions is therefore high. There are also indications that information about courses is often rendered inaccessible through the use of oblique and highly specialised language. McCulloch, 33 for example, has stated that the publication of learning outcomes through benchmark statements in the UK appears to be more a mechanism for a dominant group to articulate a code of practice to itself than information designed to be comprehensible to prospective applicants. 34 While the institutionalisation of complaints mechanisms is welcome, many institutions do not have transfer or exit mechanisms. Students dissatisfied with one course cannot easily move to another course within the same university or to another university. Refunds are also not easily obtained, and this is particularly difficult where higher education is state funded or where students obtain loans from the government which they are expected to repay after graduation.

A further complicating factor is that students, particularly those in elite universities from socially advantaged backgrounds, are well aware of the symbolic (as opposed to the functional) value of their degree. They understand that higher education operates as a partially positional good 35 in which degrees from some universities offer better social status and lifetime opportunities than others. Marginson has indicated that the positional aspect of higher education is sometimes more important than teaching quality. 36 A study by Moogan, Baron, and Harris found that UK students are more influenced by university prestige than measures of programme quality, 37 while an Australian study by James, Baldwin, and McInnis found that applicants focus strongly on course and institutional reputations by taking the requirement for high admission scores as a proxy for quality when making their selections. 38 Students are therefore predisposed to rate their degree and university highly in student-satisfaction surveys because they understand that the results of such surveys will impact on the ranking and marketability of their own degree qualification. Indeed, in at least one UK university, there have been reports of faculty encouraging positive student responses on this basis. 39

However, a crucial difference between higher education and other sectors which has important ramifications for student-university relations is that in the final analysis, institutions have the power to award or withhold a degree based on their judgement of the students’ performance. This has important implications for the power relationship between students and faculty, and related issues of empowerment. In what follows, we turn more specifically to the impact of consumerism on the pedagogic relationship and learning outcomes.

The Dangers of Commodification 40

We suggested earlier that higher education has become more open to commodification, where education develops as a product and process specifically for its ‘exchange’ rather than for its intrinsic ‘use’ value. Three overall trends are relevant here. First, as we indicated earlier, the reliance on the public university which sees post-compulsory education as a public good is being eroded on an almost global scale. It is primarily accused of being inefficient i.e. too costly, too slow to change, and too inflexible. Secondly, this is a global trend which is accelerating under the twin influences of the GATS, which decrees education as a commodity which can be traded globally, and global corporations which are turning these claims into a reality. Thirdly, the development of eLearning technologies using the internet is greatly assisting this process and this is particularly relevant to the current growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). 41 It is our contention that all three of these trends are resulting in the gradual commodification of higher education.

When we consider commodification in higher education it is useful to think about three inter-related processes. The first is knowledge itself, that is the ways in which knowledge can be assembled and packaged for the potential learner. This is usually in some form of text, whether it be a conventional textbook, specially constructed text based distance learning materials, audio-visual material, or some form of eLearning. The second element is usually summed up by the concept of pedagogy, that is the processes which go on between the teacher and the student in the context of learning. This can be synchronous, as in face-to-face learning and some modes of eLearning, or it can be asynchronous, as in the most common forms of eLearning. An integral part of pedagogy is the process of assessment, whether it is formative or summative, but it is a commonplace to argue that models of assessment tend to have an independent effect on learners and learning. These three elements react in complex ways in the learning-teaching nexus; it is clear that following the work of Biggs, 42 all the elements of the learning-teaching nexus should work together in what he calls a ‘constructive alignment’.

Knowledge and information are often perceived as interchangeable. However, attempts at the commodification of information are probably less problematic than attempts to commodify knowledge, pedagogy or assessment. Information in its unprocessed form is readily accessible to large numbers of people, except at the very frontiers of some subjects in science and technology. It is of interest to note that an institution like MIT has long been prepared to put all of its subject content on the internet as open source material. This is in recognition of the fact that what MIT adds to this is its distinctive pedagogy and its assessment of learners. All knowledge has to be ‘processed’ into pedagogically effective formats, or as Schulman puts it, into ‘pedagogic content knowledge’. 43 This is not an unproblematic process for universities which have invested heavily in IT infrastructure and e-course development and who need mass markets in order to recoup their investment. The essence of commodification is that it necessarily involves a great deal of standardisation of knowledge, resulting in a model of learning which sees the task as essentially one of adding new knowledge to students.

In some subjects, particularly in certain aspects of the sciences, it might be argued that this is relatively easy to achieve since there is an inbuilt logical linearity to the subject discourse. In Bernstein’s terms, this would apply to subjects with vertical rather than horizontal knowledge structures. 44 In this model what is required is to represent this logical linearity in the text whilst at the same time having regard for what we know about cognition, for example, how easy it is to follow and remember material displayed or represented in a certain way. However, as Crook argues, ‘research on the effective design of such materials is scarce and some of what is known might be taken to suggest that these apparently laudable ambitions of designers are misguided’. 45 It would appear that the key issue is learner engagement—that is the ability of the ‘text’ to engage the learner actively with the material such that they begin to construct or reconstruct their own models of the world according to the discipline being studied. As Crook hints, the consequences of this might mean that some of the more comprehensive and logical texts are rather less good at this than texts which are good at setting students puzzles and provocations which they have to work at to solve. 46 But even in areas like basic science this is problematic; and in areas like the humanities where cultural issues come to the fore, it can be inappropriate.

The temptation in the virtual world where one is trying to develop income via the economies of scale, is that one is producing a standardised product and generic content which can be used anywhere. This is likely to be a particular problem in the context of developing countries where national governments do not have the resources to develop indigenous higher education systems. The rebranding of higher education as an exportable commodity has led to a stampede by private for-profit providers, European and American universities and international development organisations to implement distance and other forms of profitable education provision. Commentators from the developing world such as Moja and Cloete have raised fears that weak regulation and the perception of higher education as a lucrative global export could lead to developing countries being viewed as mass markets for the dumping of low quality knowledge. 47 Hall, 48 drawing in particular on the example of the World Bank’s African Virtual University, has raised concerns that virtual education in combination with forces pushing higher education towards further commodification may harden the divide between high quality, high cost learning available to the elite, and standardised low quality packages of information delivered at low cost with little interactivity or national relevance to many parts of the developing world. They may even serve to stunt indigenous capacity in research and education. The tendency for low cost online courses to be offered to the masses, while reserving the campus experience for the elite, has even been observed within the USA. 49

In any context, such developments will have implications for learners. Entwistle suggests that there is a fairly strong relationship between academic motivation and levels of performance in higher education. 50 Motivation is not a unitary concept: we can distinguish extrinsic motivation, for example students being motivated by external pressures and rewards like obtaining a good job; intrinsic motivation derived from interest in the subject matter; and finally achievement motivation, for example motivation derived from peer competition. A consistent finding, however, is that the amount of contact with faculty in and out of class is highly correlated with motivation and interest. There is also evidence to suggest that the peer group also plays an important role. Peers have a role in the process of commenting on their fellow students’ models of the world and good teachers can engineer this as part of the pedagogic strategy. We also know that integration into the academic peer group is one of the most important indicators of retention and ultimate success.

We now turn to attempts to assess some of the evidence for the thesis that the forces of commodification in higher education tend to inhibit high quality learning. We are aware that there is a danger in choosing the example of virtual learning in higher education to illustrate our thesis that commodification and high quality learning are incompatible. The danger is that we take for granted that virtual learning automatically leads to commodification. This is not our argument. Numerous international examples such as the Open University in the UK, the doctoral programme at the Open University of Catalonia and Brazil’s teacher training programme ‘TVEscola’ attest to the fact that virtual education can provide a high quality learning environment and can overcome many of the barriers faced by off-line teaching. Castells, for example, has advanced the idea that developing countries may be able to use information technology to ‘leap-frog’ the development process. 51 He argues that the longer term process of improving the education system by developing a high quality indigenous teacher base is too slow for urgent development needs in a world where the ‘core’ appears to be spinning away from the ‘periphery’. He proposes that this process can be speeded up by using information technology and distance education in innovative and pedagogically sound ways to disseminate knowledge and skills.

Trow claims that the growth of information technology in higher education, as elsewhere, is such that we cannot standardize and freeze delivery systems or policies on the basis of what is already successful, because ‘technological developments alone’ will continually confound any such efforts. He also points out that other factors, such as the conditions of delivery, and differences in students’ talents and motivations ‘will make standardization of forms and procedures impossible’. 52 While acknowledging that there are ‘classic concerns’ among humanist scholars faced with any technologies that seem to ‘come between learner and book, or teacher and learner’, we need not assume that ‘those values and the relationships that sustain them require that teacher, book and student must share the same small physical space’. He even suggests that ‘the possibilities for elite forms of higher education through distance learning should not be foreclosed’, although he accepts that ‘it will depend on the motivation and intelligence of teachers and students to make those distant connections a vehicle for the shaping of mind, character and sensibility, rather than the mere transmission of information and knowledge at present associated with lifelong distance learning’. 53 These very issues are currently being more widely aired in the context of MOOCs.

Nevertheless, we ourselves take the view that virtual education in general is particularly vulnerable to the tendency for commodification. Commodified approaches to learning, especially widespread versions of virtual learning, often place a very large reliance on learning resources, simply because this is the simplest and easiest option. It can also represent an attempt to ‘teacher proof’ delivery which can be important if institutions are attempting to use less qualified, less experienced and thus cheaper staff. Whilst it is likely that some ‘texts’ will be more effective than others, it should be clear that the provision of appropriate texts, in whatever format, is unlikely to be effective by itself. There are limits to what can be acquired even by the very able by passively engaging with texts. Noble has argued that quality education is necessarily a labour-intensive process that depends upon a low teacher-student ratio and significant interaction between the two parties. 54 This is the essential problem for commodified models of virtual education. Commodified systems tend to be lean systems which strip away all those elements which are not strictly necessary. The end result tends to be an atomised model which focuses on the individual student as consumer of knowledge. This means that activities through which teachers adjust what they do to the needs of individual students, as well as group work, which apart from developing sets of social and interpersonal skills, also foster peer group learning, tend not to be designed in. In addition, commodified systems avoid spending money on social facilities, which promote peer interaction, on the grounds that they are not strictly necessary for learning.

Laurillard, one of the leading UK experts on technology enhanced learning, claims that MOOCs often introduce the very sort of transmission pedagogy that educators have been moving away from in recent years. 55 Commodified virtual education is often unable to provide active learning opportunities such as experimentation and real world and simulated problem solving, although some MOOCs do promise that they will be able to do so. The problems with this for organisations which are anxious to turn a profit from higher education is that such models are complex, unpredictable and expensive, and they often require a great deal of local knowledge and networks to set up and maintain. The process of feedback to students is also altered. Feedback is rolled up into formal assessment systems, in the worst cases reducing it to the results of computerised multiple choice tests. There may well be a role for such tests in certain subject areas as part of a formative feedback check on progress, but they are no substitute to the detailed, qualitative feedback required for high quality learning. Secondly, because of the close links between commodified systems and the view of students as consumers, the emphasis is placed on students producing feedback to staff on their teaching ‘performance’, rather than the reverse. Such an approach is very susceptible to surface as against deep processing. 56 Finally, if one accepts the argument that much learning develops by the process of supportive challenge of existing ideas, and the introduction of measured risk, then it is possible to see why approaches which stress commodified education processes are unlikely to produce high quality, flexible graduates. The process of introducing measured risk into the learning process is a time consuming and skilled process, almost wholly resistant to the process of commodification which tends to change the pedagogical dialectical relationship between teacher and student into one between producers and consumers of knowledge. In addition, risk is the antithesis of the safe, pre-packaged ‘product’ which is at the heart of the commodified exchange.

Commentators on the type of high quality learning required for the new economy also indicate that while first order learning may be standardised, second order learning or ‘learning how to learn’ is unpredictable and requires exposure to uncertainty and risk taking on behalf of both students and lecturers. 57 This type of learning requires personal relations of trust between students and lecturers. 58 Yet, as those of us who were educated in Western universities in the 1960s remember well, trust—or a shared habitus—has not always been a feature of relationships between students and professors even in traditional elite universities. 59 So the choice need not necessarily be between the academic paternalism of those ‘ivory towers’ and the rampant individualistic consumerism of the contemporary neoliberal university. There are other—arguably more democratic—models of high quality education that might pursued, some of them ironically coming from the corporate sector.

Alternative Approaches: Students as Co-Creative Rather Than Passive Learners

It is often the case that when one sector borrows ideas from another, outdated and shallow versions of such ideas are imported. 60 Thus, many higher education institutions have adopted an older style consumerist model based on the production of goods rather than services. This framework when combined with rising instrumental approaches to higher education on the part of students can have negative and unintended consequences for student learning.

Studies from a variety of countries indicate that, in the context outlined above, market rationality is likely to overtake other considerations and students are more likely to view the act of learning as a commercial transaction. Students who internalise this form of a consumer identity may come to place themselves outside the intellectual community and perceive themselves as passive consumers of education who abdicate their own responsibility for learning. Cheney et al. in the context of North America argue that treating students as consumers distorts pedagogical processes by confusing a momentary satisfaction of wants with educational outcomes. 61 Consistent with this mentality is a resistance to engaging in education as a process rather than a purchasable product that is simply appropriated. In a survey of Business School students, Grisoni and Wilkinson conclude that the application of consumerist mechanisms within higher education leads to a ‘banking model’ of education where information is memorised and regurgitated. 62 Nixon et al. in their phenomenological study involving sixty students at a vocational university in the second and third year of their undergraduate studies illustrate how students use the notion of choice to choose the route that they perceive to be the easiest, thus narrowing their learning experience. 63 Shumar in the USA has noted increasing demands for short pre-packaged, modularised courses. 64 These new identities and rationalities assumed by students have the potential to transform learning into a process of picking up, digesting, and reproducing what students perceive of as an unconnected series of short, neatly packaged bytes of information. Under these conditions, the student disposition generated has negative ramifications for the development of higher-order skills and, more importantly, for the dispositions and attitudes required for autonomous, lifelong learning. In some contexts there may even develop a shared instrumentalism among teachers and students. 65 The threat of student litigation and complaints, together with requirements to comply with extensive external monitoring procedures may therefore encourage academics to opt for ‘safe teaching’ which is locked into a transmission mode where pre-specified content can be passed on to the student and assessed. This is very different from the shared habitus of teachers and students in Bourdieu’s account of traditional university settings, and it is incidentally also rather different from what is often mistaken for ‘passivity’ in Confucian educational encounters. 66

However, passive consumption is not the only model of consumer relations available to higher education from the corporate world. Older approaches that assumed passive consumers have been superseded by marketing principles based on the active participation of consumers. 67 Of particular relevance to higher education are the service dominant logic of marketing 68 and approaches to management and marketing termed ‘value co-creation’. 69 Lusch and Vargo for example argue that a Service Dominant Logic has shifted marketing orientations from a philosophy in which customers are promoted, targeted, and captured, to a market philosophy in which the customer and supply-chain partners are collaborators in the entire marketing process. 70 Value is thus generated when customers and suppliers interact to create solutions. 71 Similarly, the concept of co-creation is based on the premise that consumers have specialised competencies and skills, and that companies should provide a communications environment where such consumers can apply their knowledge for mutual benefit. 72 One of the defining characteristics of services, such as education, is that the service is produced and consumed simultaneously. Value within this model is therefore the result of this ‘prosumption’ which influences the shape, content, and nature of the product or service.

In the UK, the concept of co-creation or co-production has been brought into the field of education and other ‘personalized’ public services through the work of Leadbeater 73 and the think tank Demos. These ideas were even applied to school level education in the work of Hargreaves 74 on personalization—subsequently reflected in the Gilbert Report 75 —which suggests that freedom to influence school life lies at the heart of personalized learning. He advocated giving school students more choice over the curriculum they follow, how they are assessed and who teaches them, and called for them to have more opportunities to give feedback on lessons and to participate in the interview process for prospective new teachers. He uses assessment for learning as an example of personalized learning—where teachers and students use assessment to see where learners are in their learning, and decide where they need to go, and how best to get there. While these examples appear largely individualistic, collective expressions of student voice, such as elected school councils, can support this approach by actively involving students in shaping the general ethos of a school. A current project by Demos is investigating how far the process and outcomes of co-production in other sectors, such as social care as well business, can usefully be transferred to educational settings and thereby support student engagement. 76

Principles emerging from the concept of co-creation and the service dominant logic have affinities with pedagogical models of learning based on social constructivism which emphasise the learner as an active agent. An important principle to arise from this literature is that for effective learning to occur, students need to engage in experimentation via modes of active learning, and teachers need to constantly adjust what they do to the needs of individual learners. This is of course in significant contrast to a model of learning which sees the task as one of essentially adding new knowledge to students. 77 From this perspective, students will be configured as uniquely skilled participants, who, for the production of value-in-use to occur, must be given the opportunity to share their knowledge and make significant inputs to the learning and teaching process. This also requires a new understanding of the role of teaching faculty.

Co-creation when applied to pedagogical relations in higher education represents a more dialogical model that no longer privileges the university’s vision of education but provides resources which foster the creation of specific innovative forms of student participation. Ng and Forbes state that in co-creating the learning experience, students play key roles in creating a service outcome and as a contributor to quality, satisfaction and value. 78 In this way the problems encountered by a model based on the notion of a passive and instrumental student consumer are replaced by the notion of an engaged and co-creative learner. There are indications of the emergence of versions of this model across the sector in the UK. The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick and Oxford Brookes University, for example, proposes that positioning undergraduates as researchers helps challenge the ‘hierarchical binaries between teaching and research, and teachers and students’ and offers opportunities for critical engagement. 79 There are also initiatives to position students as agents of change through action research projects that bring students and academics together to improve education. 80

As might be expected, there are however a number of criticisms of co-creation initiatives as well as crude consumerism from within the field of university education. Some critics stress the unique nature of the educational encounter and its differences from the consumption of other types of good. Indeed, some elements of consumerism and student voice seem to be in direct conflict with conventional notions of teacher professionalism. Especially in relation to issues of curriculum, over-reliance on student involvement in decision-making, whether as consumer or co-creator, could be seen as an example of what Moore and Muller have characterized as ‘the excesses of voice discourses and, in particular, the dangers of invoking experience against the knowledge claims of expertise’. 81 These ideas are developed further in Young’s own subsequent work on ‘bringing knowledge back in’, 82 while his recent work with Muller on the role of disciplines in the university implies that there would need to be strict limits to student co-creation, particularly in relation to the curriculum. 83 Co-production in relation to pedagogy may be less problematic, as may be partnership working in relation to quality assurance and quality enhancement, as discussed below.

Other scholars criticize both consumer and student voice discourses as a sham, perhaps ‘just a passing fashion, a tokenistic nod in the direction of consumerism’. 84 For good or ill, the current student voice movement, certainly in England, is certainly a relatively domesticated one. It is not about ‘student power’ in any strong sense, as in the demands of the student movement of the 1960s in the West or the ‘Cultural Revolution’ in China. It is more about partnership between students and faculty in certain limited elements of decision-making rather than radical change.

Some scholars therefore dismiss it as a process of managerial co-option or incorporation. They link student voice to notions of ‘responsibilisation’, a concept that entails subjects seeing social risks such as illness, unemployment and poverty, not as the responsibility of the state, but actually lying in the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming it into a problem of ‘self-care’. 85 In this respect, Gustafsson and Driver draw on Foucault’s concept of ‘pastoral power’ to examine whether public participation is better viewed as a necessary part of governance in modern western democracies where subjects need to be recruited to exercise power over themselves. 86 Kelly for one has identified moves to ‘normalize youth as rational, choice-making citizens, who are responsible for their future life chances through the choices they make with regard to school, career, relationships’. 87 A recent blogger responded to suggestions that ‘universities should be challenging their students to become collaborative learners rather than conformist consumers’ by arguing that this was merely an attempt by university authorities to avoid their own responsibilities for the quality of the student experience. 88 Another recent blogger has criticised the pervasive discourse of ‘the student experience’ as failing to recognise that there is not one student experience but a whole variety of different ones, 89 agreeing with who argues that ‘the student experience’ homogenises students and deprives them of agency at the same time as apparently giving them ‘voice’. 90 If we then link processes of responsibilisation to the use of choice and competition, student voice and consumerism can arguably be seen as two aspects of neo-liberalism rather than as simple alternatives to each other.

For these reasons and others, there is only limited acceptance within the field of university education in the West of both consumerism and student voice. As would be expected from the discussion of Bourdieu’s work above, the status of different institutions anyway influences how quickly and to what degree either consumerism or student voice initiatives penetrate and restructure core academic cultures and practices. There also seem to be differences between disciplines. A UK study by Little et al. found that notions of students as ‘partners in a learning community’ were stronger in certain subject areas (for example, Art and Design and Performing Arts) than in others. 91 Thus the longer term impact of both consumerism and co-production remains unclear, along with the extent to which they are commodifying or democratising learning and impacting on conceptions of quality in higher education.

Looking Forward

Meanwhile, there have been a number of attempts at national level in the UK to incorporate a student perspective in higher education quality assurance and quality enhancement procedures. While some aspects of this, such as the National Student Survey, can be seen as linked to an individualistic consumerist perspective, other initiatives seek to give students greater collective involvement and ‘voice’ in assuring the quality of higher education.

The QAA is the national body charged with the duty to safeguard standards and improve the quality of UK higher education. For a number of years, students have been actively involved in its quality assurance procedures and its Chief Executive, McClaran, has recently said that students will continue to play a prominent role in assessing their own academic experiences. Student reviewers have been added to visiting peer review teams, student representatives at institutions being scrutinised are more involved in the review process, and students have been given a formal role in QAA governance through a Student Advisory Board and the inclusion of two student members on the QAA Board. He claims that ‘contrary to some rather gloomy predictions, greater student involvement in quality assurance across reviews and QAA governance has so far proven to be an unqualified success’. 92 Additionally, he reports that communication with students and the public about the quality of UK higher education has been made clearer and more direct, ‘using all the channels that modern technology offers’. 93

However, Brown argues that in a traditional supply-driven system, where resources, conditions and types of offerings do not vary greatly between institutions, where the taxpayer is meeting most of the cost, and where there is little information purporting to indicate educational quality, there is unlikely to be huge external interest in quality. Once these conditions are relaxed, as they are being in England at the present time, and especially where students or families are meeting most of the costs, concerns about quality take on greater significance. While previously consumers may have been content to accept the claims of universities and their faculty to protect quality, attention has now shifted to outcomes, and whether those outcomes represent good value for money for the investment made. 94 He further argues, that as a result of recent consumer-oriented reforms in England, there is ‘a very clear risk’ that the responsibility for determining the appropriateness of standards and programmes will pass from academics and professional and subject bodies to students and, effectively, the media, through such devices as ‘institutional rankings and league tables, websites like <ratemyprofessor.com>, and thousands of web-based reviews’ (Brown, 2013, p. 11). 95

Although Brown’s scenario remains a distinct possibility and is likely to have greatest impact in universities with least institutional self-confidence, we would argue that there may also be ways in which greater student engagement can enhance rather than detract from academic quality. Some of the more participatory modes of student engagement we have discussed here differ from both traditional and crude consumerist approaches to quality and, contrary to the fears of some traditionalists, they may have the potential to challenge academic complacency without undermining core academic values.