The giant sums spent through many universities on marketing must come as no surprise (Report, three April). No need to the reality that it is in most cases the much less prestigious establishments which can be doing the maximum of the spending. Like grade inflation, the upward push in unconditional gives and massively inflated vice-chancellors’ salaries, it’s miles the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of the marketization that started out with the removal of the subsidy for overseas college students in 1980, as described in my 2013 book with Helen Carasso, Everything for Sale: The Marketisation of UK Higher Education.
Short of a wholesale reversal of such policies, the most effective solution is for the universities to agree, and the Office for Students to police, what percentage of their earnings to spend on activities that do not directly aid scholar education. The reality that such an arrangement could be anathema to a neoliberal authorities suggests most effective that they and their advisers fail to appreciate that markets in higher training aren’t monetary markets, in which the gamers compete for resources, but repute markets, where the players compete for popularity, and in which kingdom motion is needed to defend the “clients” from the diversion of assets that such sports as advertising and marketing constitute.
• While individual universities are spending tens of millions of kilos to recruit college students, overall debt inside the higher schooling quarter has trebled in current years to nearly £11bn. At the equal time, there is a developing scarcity of technology, technology, engineering and maths graduates; too many college students leaving university without important employability skills; and a high proportion of graduates in jobs that don’t require tiers. All of these factors to the failure of a “marketization” coverage which has created deep flaws in the HE device. Surely the time has come to transport far away from this laissez-faire, defined with the aid of the all-celebration public bills committee as a market that isn’t always “running in the interest of college students or taxpayers”. An extra planned and wishes-led technique to better training might better serve the united states of america’s talent necessities as well as graduates’ career prospects.
