Proliferation of Market Logics in Higher Education

This is an excerpt from a longer paper completed as part of a course for a degree in Higher Education. Download the full paper here. 

Plato presents a strong civic- and collective-mindedness in his educational ideal. Rousseau, drawing on his Enlightenment-era brand of libertarianism, advocates fiercely for education’s role in the development of the individual. Dewey, in a humanistic synthesis of these two ideals presents a view that the philosophy undergirding educational work must foster the individual and her or his interests while also promoting interconnectedness as the basis for democratic society. Nearly 100 years after Dewey’s writing, and almost 2500 years after Plato, what is the underlying philosophical structure of our education system today?

My focus here is on the philosophical underpinnings of public higher education in the United States; I have a particular interest in Land Grant Universities, though much of the literature provides a simpler bifurcation of ‘private’ and ‘public’ higher education institutions. I will argue that the dominant philosophical basis for decisions made in public higher education institutions is the enablement of capitalist structures of power, and I will question the assumptions implied therein. This discussion will draw heavily on the literature of academic capitalism—a theoretical framework exploring the integration of market capitalist ideologies and practices into the fabric of higher education institutions (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).  This ideology is made manifest in the curricular environment via concepts like an over-focus on employability, workforce development, STEM, “practicality,” etc.  We can equally observe this educational philosophy in the dwindling of financial support for programs and initiatives deemed less useful to capitalist progress including arts, humanities, and some versions of social sciences (Zuckerman & Ehrenberg, 2009). At the institutional level, the proliferation of market principles takes shape in the ever intensifying view of students as revenue centers with campuses vying for tuition, housing payments, and other expenditures (Hossler, 2006). An often-misunderstood reality of the modern university is that education of students is only one part of its identity and function. As institutions, universities have outsourced housing, dining services, and other amenities in the name of economic efficiency. In the research sector, following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, technology transfer offices have proliferated and university patenting has grown exponentially in hopes of finding new ways to generate revenue (Morris, 2016). Cutting “unnecessary costs,” building revenue generating programs, encouraging public-private partnerships, and developing research that leads to patentable intellectual property are clear examples of extra-curricular academic capitalism, but are beyond the scope of this paper.

I begin with an interrogation of the scholarly concept of academic capitalism, including its implications for students. I then consider how the university’s orientation toward meeting the needs of the “knowledge-based economy” (as opposed to a knowledge-based society) enabled the internalization of some market ideologies as “common sense.” Next, I explore several assumptions underlying these developments by questioning whether that which is good for the economy is good for society and the student. Economic growth is an unchallenged “social good,” but is it?  I then consider how the assumption that higher education is a path toward economic stability for the individual student undergirds the employment-centric individualism characteristic of capitalist thinking. I’ll also briefly explore whether it is even true that higher education leads to better employment. Finally, I consider pathways for how market ideology has come to dominate our public institutions and discuss what is at stake.

The developments discussed here matter because—particularly in public structures—we must actively and democratically work to ensure that our institutions reflect the ideological and practical values that we collectively hold. Bluntly, the installation of power-laden ideologies without consent threatens democracy, and an ideology uncritically accepted is a worldview unwittingly internalized. Describing and analyzing current realities clearly is the first step toward enabling the difficult work of imagining other possible futures. Contrasting our present with phenomena and value structures from other times or places helps us to understand the present as one among many possibilities.