The 2^nd annual Higher Education Policy Institute Lecture was given on March 25 by Robert Reich at the Royal Institution, London. Reich is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University and a former Secretary of Labor in US President Bill Clinton's administration. Reich makes as a key observation "higher education in the United States is coming to resemble any other kind of personal service industry... [and] there is a kind of marketisation that has set in."

Pointing out to his audience that some 80% of American university students addend public universities Professor Reich continued:

More generally there has been a decline, as I indicated, in the mission of public education. Instead of a public investment for a public return, instead of the rationale being to mobilise the most talented members of society for the good of society, for social leadership in a more complex world, the kind of rhetoric we heard in the 1950s, '60s and early 1970s, the emphasis has shifted. There are two major sets of missions we hear now. One has to do with personal or family investment - that is higher education is thought to be a personal or family investment and not all that dissimilar from an investment in the stock market or an investment in real estate. To the extent that the family can afford to make the investment, the family ought to be making that investment - it's a wise and prudent investment. We hear more and more the term "human capital", a perfectly appropriate economic term, I use it quite often, others of you in this room have used it but it is used in the context of, again, education - higher education - being a private investment and with the expected higher private return for those individuals capable of making that investment.

 

The second related theme we hear more and more of, again if you pass the rhetoric and pass the language coming out at the beginning of the 1980s, is that higher education should provide a possibility of upward mobility for talented individuals. That is meritocracy is not necessarily for the good of society as a whole, meritocracy is a notion of fairness that is linked to individual upward mobility - it's only fair if every child can make the most of his or her inherent talents and abilities for his or her own future gains. Now the challenge stated over and over again is to make it possible for young people of more modest means to borrow against their imputed wealth - the wealth that presumably they would gain privately if they had an opportunity to fully develop their inherent talents and abilities. Again there is nothing wrong with this idea, just as there is nothing wrong with the more broad notion, that I mentioned a moment ago, of education as an opportunity for anybody to invest in their future wealth but it's very different - both of these ideas - are quite distinct from the dominant ideas that one heard in the 1950s, '60s and '70s about social good, about the public good that attached to higher education.

Professor Reich drew a correlation between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of the perception of the importance to work for the public good, i.e. the concept of the good of the nation as being of consequence for the well being of the individual. He went on to relate an anecdote relevant to marketisation which may be seen to be pertinent  to which Australian institutions in the near future may call themselves "universities".

 [A] colleague of mine, Professor David Cooke at the University of California, Berkeley, has written a book recently on the marketing of higher education in the United States. [I]n his book he refers to, for example, Beaver College in Pennsylvania, a small college with what became an unfortunate name. In America a kind of colloquial vernacular, it refers to a kind of a - it's a rude expression. So the college, the heads of the college, decided that they would get together, they had focus groups, they hired some high priced marketing executives and they wanted a college name, a higher education university name that would be very attractive. They went through every possible combination and they came up with Arcadia.

The focus group, the marketing people, thought that Arcadia denoted something wonderfully rural and sublime, romantic and so it would be Arcadia. But instead of college the marketing people also discovered that most American parents preferred university to college, university sounded larger and more serious. So Beaver College became Arcadia University. And interestingly applications to Arcadia University soared. So the marketing people were to that extent correct.

And at this point the Professor from Brandeis became deadly serious alluding to what may be an inevitable consequence of the "marketisation of higher education".

There is also along with the marketisation of higher education a greater and greater emphasis on vocational and pre-career university courses and the advertising and marketing of vocational and pre-career - accounting, law, economics, finance, engineering, applied sciences - these are becoming very, very popular, undergraduate curricula; these areas are expanding dramatically, a faculty who are teaching in these areas are paid better and better. And so more seriously the classics - literature, history, some of the basic sciences - have become poor stepchildren. Because you see it follows that as you envision higher education as a system of private investment for private return and as that sinks into the public's mind it naturally follows that the concept of a liberal arts education or an education in humanities or the education in broad-based social sciences or in classics or whatever has less and less justification in the public's mind.

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And finally with regard to marketisation let me mention one other trend. And that is the close and increasingly close collaboration between public higher education and indeed much of private higher education in the United States and private industry.

 

On research, on what is to be researched, on capital investments and laboratories and buildings and so forth. Individual members of faculty increasingly become consultants to private industry. Not necessarily a bad thing, in fact if you understand the purpose of the university to be to enhance the private return on private investment it's clearly consistent with that. But there are adverse consequences which I will turn to now.

 

The first adverse consequence from the marketisation of higher education in the United States concerns social stratification. The most prestigious brands of higher education increasingly are available only to those who can pay for them.

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The second unfortunate consequence of the marketisation of higher education in America, this retreat from the concept of public mission is a potential loss of universities as centres of basic learning. By basic learning I mean basic research, fundamental inquiry, learning that does not translate itself easily into applied economic value. As the curricula of American universities and as the research agendas migrate closer and closer and closer to the private sector there is less and less room and less and less incentive and less and less money available to pursue the more basic inquiry and the more basic research that may be unrelated to any direct application.

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And finally there is a worry that I have with regard to the corruption of the universities' role in society of speaking truth to power. A university's role as a centre of inquiry and critical inquiry about not only the nature of truth but also of public policy. Years ago university presidents in the United States very often made quite controversial speeches. During the Vietnam War, during the civil rights movement, during the McCarthy era - Joseph McCarthy in the United States, the Communist witch hunt era - university presidents stood up, made controversial provocative and in some cases very courageous statements about what society should be doing.

Professor Reich then admonished his listeners, "Use the market, use market incentives, it is very wise to use market incentives, but use them for public purposes... with regard to higher education there is a fundamental public purpose to be served..."

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web