My life in Higher Education: To be or not?

Indeed. I am abandoning my heroic pretensions - it's time for plain-speaking.

I got to a dead-end in 2024 when my attempt to construct a new type of higher education got diluted beyond recognition. Someone somewhere decided that it is only about storytelling, no need to sweat about the details. I was told - students don't want anything good, they want cheap. There was an objective disconnect: While I held that the brands are stories with substance, my colleagues in private higher education decided that anything with a university logo stamped on it should be enough.

I did my Quixotic act since then, but that spectre of mediocrity won't leave me. It seems we have lost the sense of what higher education was meant to be. I wonder though how this state of affairs came to be. Some of these are surely due to privatisation, the money power in education business, which passed the educational decision making in the hands of money men and the brain-dead bureaucrats who enable them.

Indeed, this is not about privatisation alone, but private higher education has something to do with it. Public higher education only came to be alongside the Welfare State, and at best have a two hundred year history, during which time private higher education and educator-entrepreneurs persisted alongside. But charlatans, while they were always part of the picture, never called the shot. Until recently, that is.

I shall argue that this has something to do with globalisation and the market for international students. In fact, this perhaps starts with the 'roaring nineties', the Blair-Clinton years of higher education for all, along with the human capital arguments that encouraged student mobility. The idea that the universities would serve as factories to produce globally mobile wage labour over-rode the idea of university as a community. The managerialism that we see now is not the cause, but a result of this transformation. 

This is indeed a very British perspective, where there are too many international students paying a lot of money to the universities, money which has a life of its own and pay for the agents, private sector subcontractors and staff. But a similar story played out in all international study destinations, though, exceptionally, the US higher education system expanded to accommodate its own disadvantaged population as well.

This has set off a domino effect worldwide. The developing countries embraced the idea that more people going to the university improves national competitiveness, and granted university licenses to private entrepreneurs indiscriminately. They have started worshipping GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio) without giving much thought about what kind of university might be right for them. In India and China, this has pleased the middle class who mainly saw Higher Education not as a way to contribute to local communities, but as a way to enhance mobility - an opportunity to join the wage labour in tandem with the expansion of global capitalism.

The universities that were designed to support this were very different in their objectives, structure and engagement - and they are scarcely understood by people who study and write about higher education (with some notable exceptions). While private higher education is very large and growing, and is increasingly being funded by public money (through privatisation of student finance), this sector avoids critical scrutiny that is accorded to other similar activities. 

Further, the link between globalisation and private higher education - and the effect this had on the wider higher education sector - has received scant attention. There are students marching on the street in India, as the promises of mobility have failed to materialise, but that is only one of the many ways to understand what really is afoot. There is the question of control over one's own life, of technological change, of geopolitical uncertainty - all interacting to produce a different dynamic! 

As I research and understand this more, I see that my efforts are naïve and based on an incomplete idea of what Higher Ed is. But understanding this makes it interesting - a microcosm to observe neoliberalism in action! In a way, this is more complex than a straightforward story of corruption, because education involves a very large number of people very intimately as well as being defined by history and politics.

In a way, my failure is my beginning.