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NEW CAPITALISM |
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When institutions like IBM, the World Bank and the US think-tank the RAND Institute start issuing reports urging "reform" it's usually a sign that something nasty is around the corner, particularly as they have access to the ear of governments. All have recently turned their attention to higher education (HE), advocating marketisation, partial privatisation and still further subordination of universities and their curricula to the needs of business. By Bruce Robinson |
Their agenda is spelt out most clearly in the World Bank document "The Financing and Management of Higher Education: A Status Report on Worldwide Reforms", which was presented to a UNESCO Conference in 1998. It claims that its "reform agenda" is being followed across the world from Europe and the US through the ex-Stalinist bloc, China and Vietnam and a range of Third World countries. It sees higher education in these countries as facing the same pressures. The numbers going into HE will continue to expand and at the same time the types of HE on offer will have to diversify. Alongside expansion, there is a global fiscal crisis, partly a consequence of increased numbers, but also because of a decline in, and increased competition for government funding.
As this decline in state spending is seen as irreversible, and is indeed welcomed by the World Bank, HE is seen as ripe for market solutions:
"The reform agenda of the 90s, and almost certainly extending well into the next century, is oriented to the market rather than to public ownership or to governmental planning and regulation. Underlying the market orientation of tertiary education is the ascendance, almost world-wide, of market capitalism and the principles of neo-liberal economics.
"Higher education [has many characteristics] of a private good, amenable to the forces of the market... This market orientation has lead to elements of the reform agenda such as tuition [fees], which shifts some of the higher education cost burden from taxpayers to parents and students, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of higher education, more nearly full cost fees for institutionally-provided room and board, and more nearly market rates of interest on student loans, all of which rely upon market choices to signal worth and true trade-offs."
By a private good, they mean that the benefits of education accrue to individuals, rather than society as a whole, and the costs should therefore be borne by individuals who seek out the best deal they can afford in the market. (There is apparently a US website where university places are auctioned!) At the same time, universities should be given more autonomy to act as market-led institutions. Accordingly, the role of government shrinks to tinkering with those aspects that the market cannot provide, such as equity, with the result that "as universities and higher education systems pay more attention to, e.g., good personnel practices, cash flow, market position, product diversification, and accountability, they will look more 'private' than the stereotype of 'public', even if they remain state owned, substantially tax-supported, and avowedly 'public' in their mission."
The effects of the fiscal crisis are overcome by "shifting the burden of higher educational costs from the general taxpayer or general citizen to parents and students especially - but also to philanthropists and to purchasers of university services". This shift is to occur by means of the following appetising menu: "(a) the introduction of, or substantial increases in, tuition and full or more nearly full-cost fees into higher education sectors hitherto supported primarily or wholly by public revenues, (b) the introduction of means tested grants and loans, (c) the encouragement of private higher education supported mainly through tuition fees, (d) the encouragement of entrepreneurial activities on the part of the faculty and/or the university, and (e) the encouragement of philanthropy - for endowment, for direct operations, and for scholarships to students."
Thus as well as shifting costs from the state to individuals, the "fiscal crisis" is to be overcome by making universities into businesses. The RAND Institute in their 1997 report "The Fiscal Crisis of Higher Education" puts this bluntly:
"Like the [US private] health care industry, the higher education sector must systematically address issues of cost, productivity, efficiency and effectiveness as a prerequisite for public sector investment. Indeed if the HE sector is to get a sympathetic ear from legislators, it is unlikely to win unless it has put itself through the same sort of streamlining and re-engineering that the business community has to reduce costs and improve service."
In practice, this means such changes as the outsourcing of teaching to more "cost-effective" profit-driven providers, increased job insecurity for admin staff and most academics (in Britain, more and more university lecturers are now employed on fixed-term contracts), and more and more homogeneous packaging of "product" delivered by information technology with little or no direct contact between teacher and student.
While these measures may deal with the financing of HE, they do not resolve the second requirement of "reform" - the meeting of capital's needs for a graduate workforce with certain skills (gained before business has to start paying for on-the-job training) and also for research "outputs" that can be applied or exploited commercially. These needs are to be met by two strategies: firstly, "diversification" in the types of higher education available; and secondly, by an even more direct role for business in determining what is taught and administering universities.
"Diversification" is, according to the World Bank, "a strategy whereby the social demand for higher education is managed through the development of a variety of lower cost alternative institutions differentiated in terms of missions, function and modes of delivery..." In other words, there will be an increasingly large number of varieties of higher education ranging from expensive, traditional and increasingly semi-privatised elite education producing members of professions and researchers, through occupationally oriented courses for producing, say, teachers, to mass, cheap and skills-oriented courses used to supply industry with the types of people it requires.
Consequently, RAND thinks it may be necessary to abolish "the traditional sharp distinction between the bachelor's degree and all other non-degree categories", replacing it with "the attainment of more specific, measurable knowledge sets". Thus there has already been talk of two year degrees in more vocationally focussed subjects in the UK. Alongside this universities will come to differ more and more in terms of function - for example, not all will be funded to do research.
Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark sums it up: "Through so-called mission differentiation, the restructuring will both further advance the class stratification of higher education and rationalize and economize on the processes whereby workers are sorted into their 'appropriate' places in the educational and employment hierarchies."
While the UK has not yet embraced this strategy as wholeheartedly as the US, nearly all the prerequisites for it to do so are in place. The undergraduate population trebled from 300,000 to just under a million without any increase in the resources to support it, and since then, in England, funding has fallen a further 18% in real terms. Mass entry to HE has been achieved on the cheap, and accordingly a worse education is on offer to those who take it up.
At the same time, the Russell Group, representing the top dozen elite research universities (e.g., Oxbridge, LSE, Imperial College, Manchester, UCL) are pushing for "diversification", both by claiming a much larger share of research funding, which would lead de facto to a division into research and teaching-only universities, and also by pushing for the right to charge "top-up" fees, which means being allowed to charge what the "market" will bear. Most of these universities are already, according to recent official figures, the most socially exclusive with around 5% of students taken from "low participation" (i.e., poorer) neighbourhoods and with fewer mature students. Oxford still takes less than 50% of undergraduates from state schools. If these institutions are allowed to set their own levels of tuition fees, the higher costs will mean even fewer working class students entering top universities unless, of course, they benefit from the "philanthropy" of scholarships as they had to do in the days before student grants.
Scattered throughout these reports are demands that universities should become more attuned to the needs of the "knowledge-based economy", market themselves to industry and, in short, prioritise the requirements of big business if they are to remain "relevant" and worthy of either public finance or private donations. That this means a downgrading of subjects without obvious usefulness to business (or at least, their restriction to the elite universities) and a de facto silencing of critical voices is made clear in a book entitled What Business wants from Higher Education, by one Dr. Diana Oblinger, an academic with the title "Manager, Academic Programs and Strategy, IBM Global Education Industry".
Oblinger argues that students should be taught "to understand the unwritten rules of the corporate culture" as employers, says Oblinger, want employees "who can adapt to the organisation, understand the job requirements, and produce work that has a clear return - as quickly as possible. Adding value, especially in the short term, relies on knowledge, speed of learning, ability to work in teams, and adjusting to the culture of the organisation." Instead, "new hires have little understanding of the role of the corporation".
Oblinger explicitly advocates shifting the burden of training costs and courses from employers to colleges, one consequence of which must be the shedding of those subjects and people that are not "efficient" in terms of producing what industry needs. "Liberal arts faculty, who often have little contact with business personnel, are inclined to insist that job preparation is not their concern... Many representatives of this group are openly hostile to business." Never mind any notion of academic freedom. These people had better shape up or their funding will wither away.
My personal experience of teaching for four years in a university institute set up in the Thatcher years to meet skill shortages in information technology and build "business-university partnerships" suggests that this process has already gone some way in Britain and that there are a lot of Oblingers about. Business representatives on course committees (and managers on part time courses) displayed a contempt for academics as being out of touch with "the real world" of business and for course content that did not meet labour market imperatives or provide marketable skills. Thus a dislike for anything requiring critical thought or analysis went with a narrow utilitarian concern for the needs of industry in a way that is probably typical of the outlook that will come to dominate if the "reform" agenda goes ahead.
The nightmarish vision in these reports states frankly and clearly the capitalist agenda for higher education. We must challenge their basic assumptions, both about the "fiscal crisis" and what education should be about. We must reassert the need for a right to higher education in a system that is adequately and publicly funded. It is also not sufficient just to want things to stay as they are (or rather were in some mythical past). After all, even before these latest developments, several generations of radical students criticised the role of universities in society and the content of what they were taught.
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