The idea of a university ‘market’ leads to a raft of problems

It is a well-known fact that the UK university sector has been hit by heavy cuts to the part of its income that comes from the state. At the same time there is extensive discussion about raising ‘top-up’ fees from their present maximum of just over £3000 per year. In a few years time some universities, including Durham, may be charging much higher fees than that. These points are connected: increased fees are one way for universities to make up for income lost from other sources. Current students need not panic: this will not affect you, though it may affect your younger brothers and sisters, and it seems certain to affect your children – even if this seems a long way off at the moment!
Now anyone standing to incur that kind of debt when they graduate will want to shop around carefully. Does the university charging top fees really offer enough in return to make it a good investment? How much more likely are you to get the kind of job that will enable you to pay back your debt?
Where the potential student becomes a customer and thinks in this sort of way, higher education becomes a market. The student, armed with league tables and other information, is in the driving seat, in theory, and each university has to improve what it provides in order to attract customers. The market thus raises standards of provision. This part of it, at least, looks like a Good Thing.
There are, however, some familiar objections. First, if education is primarily an investment for the individual then it is no longer a public good, justified by producing civilised graduates who put their enhanced capacities at the services of other people and the planet.
Second, if Durham (say) charges realistic fees and improves what it offers, perhaps even more students will apply than now. But then the University is in the driving seat, not the student – because the University can pick and choose who it takes. This only changes if Durham can take many more undergraduates than it does now. But, if this happens, future students would lose what a lot of you currently value about Durham – its relatively small scale and intimacy.
Third, where you have a market you have commodification, the creation of a brand which becomes more important than the real thing. Just as people buy some items of clothing mainly for their label, it might become more important to graduate with a particular University ‘label’ than actually to be well-taught there. Then it would pay for universities to polish their image and invest in their websites, prospectuses and advertising, to make their brand or label better known.
A fourth objection to ‘the market’ is this: education, it is often said, exists not simply to satisfy preferences, but to shape them. That is, while most providers of goods try to find out what their customers want (or can be persuaded to want) and provide it, education does something different. It says, in effect, ‘you may want to study this, but we think you’d benefit from something else. You may want to go on studying Nazi Germany, which you enjoyed at A-level, and the idea of a module on medieval France may not float your boat. But we think it would do you good. And we should know: we are, after all, the experts on History’.
This objection appeals to university lecturers, partly because it confirms the traditional view of their status, but also because there is a lot of truth in it. What position is the budding philosophy student in to say that she can’t be doing with that scary-looking stuff on formal logic, but Buddhism for Beginners looks a bit more chilled?
Still there are dangers here. Perhaps a university might market itself as Reassuringly Difficult, as well as reassuringly expensive. A Hogwarts Higher Education, more or less.
Worse than this, such a view might seem to absolve a university from explaining why it teaches what it teaches – the students are in no position to understand, and will have to take it on trust, from the experts. But students can understand good reasons, and explaining their reasons is precisely what universities need to do a lot more. It would help their students to understand just why they are studying what they are. It would help the wider world understand what universities are for and why they matter, and win them more friends and allies against under-funding. We need a ‘market’ in university education that involves more explanation and discussion, and less league tables and image management. This itself would be educational progress.

Richard Smith is a professor in the
Department of Education.