Changing: Towards a new form of student development
In summary, the entire system functioned as a component of a talent value chain. The industrial thinking has been apparent - the student came in as the input, the graduate came out as the output - and the goal of educational improvement has been process efficiency. The value of the educational intervention sprang not from the process of education itself, but the value that the talent marketplace accorded to the graduate thus produced.
Some institutions, particularly top-ranked research institutions, may claim that they haven't been affected by this 'vocational' transformation. They claim that their processes are not attuned to the immediate requirements of the job market, and in the case of Oxford, I was told that their focus is on the long-term transformation, what the graduate would do in 15 or 20 years, rather than immediately after graduation.
But this is because these institutions sit at the top of various university rankings, which are designed to create 'signalling value', how the outside world perceives an education pursued at Oxford, rather than the intrinsic value of the Oxford education. The value of education resides outside, in the market. Regardless of whether the institution is a top-ranking research institution, a humble vocational college, or a school designed to produce Oxford entrants or apprenticeship candidates, the education system, as a component of the value chain, has been the dominant idea of our time.
Beyond marketisation
It is so dominant that no one would think another idea is even possible. Why would someone devote a certain number of years to schools and universities if there is no external recognition or material rewards for such an effort? How would one measure the efficacy of an educational intervention without any benchmarks, either in terms of economic outcomes or reputational ranking?
At this point, I want to make an important distinction. These are similar to the arguments for 'marketisation' of education, for using external benchmarks and business management methods to deliver educational outcomes. My intention is not to take a stance for or against marketisation, but rather to establish a different point, related to student development, altogether.
But before that, it is worth pointing out that the usual critique of marketisation rests on an uncertain premise: that this is a recent phenomenon, and before the 'financialisation' of everything, education was pursued for its own sake, rather than the validation from the 'market'. However, the education system has always been intricately linked to society as a whole. One went to university for a reason, such as to work for the Church or the state, and these benefits were also derived from the external validation of the educational offering. The students may not have paid the full cost of education in developed countries earlier. Still, someone somewhere, an imperial subject or a subaltern who had the odds stacked against them, was made to pay for such privileges.
In fact, the way we organise our society - with perks and privileges, status arising out of professional careers and material possessions, wealth of nations tied to real estate, etc. - it is rather presumptuous to think that education, and notably higher education, should be exempted from bureaucratic processes and drawing value from external validation of the market. My argument, instead, is that the phase we have lived through since the 1990s has now peaked, and we need to look beyond the overarching assumptions underlying our current models of education.
These assumptions shaped higher education as we know it. These get accepted by both sides of the marketisation argument and treated as starting points, both inside and outside academia. I argue, however, that without attempting to settle the debate about the effects of market-led changes over the last 30 years, it is possible to question three key assumptions on the basis that higher education has always, and will continue to, respond to what society demands.
Assumption 1: Society=Market
The first assumption is that the markets reflect the social needs in the most perfect way. In other words, 'society=market', which is the idea behind the argument that higher education has always been connected to social requirements. One has gone down this path since the 1990s (perhaps since Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed that there was no such thing as society). Still, we have now become aware that history has not ended, and we, along with our students, must deal with more than the globalised market society. In fact, the extreme proponents of the market, such as many members of the current US administration, actively demonstrate the role of the political process and subjective influences on the market processes. In other words, a society is much more than just the market, even if both of these are 'fictions' (to use Yuval Noah Harari's word). Hence, an education validated by society may not be the same as an education validated by the market, and neither of those could represent a stable and universal model.
Assumption 2: Educational Capacity=Access to education
There is the question of 'massification' of higher education since the 1990s, with an increasing number of people entering tertiary education, accompanied by a rapid expansion of the sector. This has been accompanied by massive public investment in higher education in almost every country, alongside the creation of a lucrative private sector. This has significantly increased educational capacity, but not necessarily improved educational access (which can be defined as not only being able to attend university, but also being able to participate in it and derive benefits from it).
The reason for this is that massification depends on a key idea - that education equals qualification. This is more pervasive than simply stating qualifications equal education, because this has pushed out all sorts of non-formal educational pathways, which existed in the absence of mass higher education, from consideration. Today, non-formal pathways are primarily the preserve of those who possess sufficient social capital. This is why MOOCs have been mainly taken up and completed by individuals who are already well-educated, while first-generation students and the underprivileged often require formal education.
This has undermined the role that non-formal and alternative offerings played in student development, in preparing students for education, and in encouraging them to initiate their own educational pursuits. The absence of this has hindered the participation and outcomes of formal education, while also limiting alternatives to it.
Assumption 3: Education leads to Human Capital formation
Human capital formation has become the primary justification for offering higher education. Even those who criticise marketisation justify the need for more and better education in terms of human capital, and demand more public investment for 'national competitiveness'.
Human capital is a demand-led, rather than a supply-side, phenomenon. For something or someone to be considered 'capital', it must be needed to produce a material outcome. The acceptance of human capital as the ultimate goal of all education, and reducing all education to human capital formation, ties all educational activities to the already existing talent value chain. The key problem with this is that education is a future-focused activity, requiring students to become productive members of society over the next 15 to 20 years, which necessitates a focus on capability development rather than capital formation at present.
One way of viewing this is that research universities are focusing on capacity building. In contrast, the rest of the tertiary education sector is focused on developing human capital for the present. This is how most of our present Higher Education system is organised. This creates the multi-tier system that we have today, along with elaborate filters, to provide meritocratic access to different levels of opportunity.
The Disruptive Moment
Multiple forces are currently challenging these assumptions.
The market-society was accepted on the promise of prosperity, at least for the opinion-forming classes. The idea climate accepted a flattening of the economic playing field; therefore, 'class' as a category became somewhat dated, and instead shifted the focus to various identity groups, both on the right, which denied their existence, and on the left, which made such identities the centre-piece of the agenda of social change. In a sense, commitment to identities proves Thatcher's point - there is no thing as society - and accepts the market as the only common ground of interaction, exchange and development. However, the identity wars have reached their denouement, with 'elite overproduction' and the revolt of the elite as a consequence. The consensus is that, for some, surrender is necessary for a market society to operate, with everyone agreeing on certain 'fictions,' such as social mobility. Without this, class identities are making a comeback, demanding that education be honest about social structures and the challenges of students' lives.
In summary, absent the promise of social mobility - and in many developing countries, this is intricately linked to geographical mobility, which is now being constrained - students are rediscovering their identities. True, they may not understand 'class' as their grandparents saw, but neither are they beholden to the post-modern ideas of gender or sexual preferences. Society as a system of ordering boundaries and defining what a good life may mean is making sense again.
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