The USS Strike in Context: The Marketisation of Education
The ongoing USS strike highlights the consequences of the marketisation of education. Neoliberalism has seeped into all layers of the British education system. Education is increasingly viewed as a means to an end, and educational providers are seen as responsible for providing students with a way of successfully entering the labour market. These developments have problematic implications for students and society as a whole.
Copyright: Inga Steinberg
Anyone following UK news is likely to have noticed that university lecturers have been striking for the past three weeks. The strike is about pension reforms. Universities UK (UKK) plan on changing the Universities' Superannuation Scheme (USS), from a defined benefit scheme, guaranteeing lecturers a pension income, to a defined contribution scheme, with no guaranteed pension. However, issues far larger underlie the reasons for the strike. It is occurring in a context of changes in the education system and can be best understood through the increasing marketisation of education driven by neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism in the British Tertiary Education System
In broad terms, neoliberalism can be defined as an ideology in favour of extended marketisation with the state taking a facilitating role (Mirowski 2013). Since the 1980s, this ideology has affected British education system on all levels. In light of the ongoing strike, I will focus on higher education.
Students as Consumers of Education
High university tuition fees are changing the way students think about education. Career prospects are playing an ever-increasing role in students’ choices. A recent example of a student suing the University of Oxford for receiving a 2:1 which “cost him a lucrative legal career” perfectly illustrates that students “see university as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself” (NUS 2008, p. 3), and performance on paper is increasingly valued over learning.
The university system is perpetuating this view of students as consumers of education. Because universities are competing, and because student satisfaction feeds into rankings, what students want (rather than what they need) is at the centre of attention. This often leads to “spoon feeding” in teaching practices (Smith 2008), because students are trying to obtain the highest grades possible to have a good start in the labour market, while universities want to please students to move up in the league tables.
Taken together, the above has highly problematic implications for the quality of learning in UK universities. Academics are in fact doing their students a disfavour when designing modules in the way students want them to. A recent review of the literature found that those teachers who increase their students’ performance in subsequent courses (and therefore their ability to learn) the most get the worst student satisfaction ratings (Kornell & Hausman 2016). When the focus shifts towards how students want to be taught in order to be able to easily pass exams, students are not learning important skills such as collaboration and critical thinking. Increasingly, rather than being taught knowledge, which “requires inquiry, method, and above all time”, students are simply fed information which they need to reproduce to succeed.
The Demise of the Humanities
Viewing education as a means to enter the labour market is leading to the preference of certain academic fields. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are favoured both by students and by funding organisations and governments. From a student’s perspective, going into STEM fields is advantageous due to the high salaries present in STEM careers (Britton et al. 2016). This is reflected in field of study choice; for example, in 2012, applications to English degrees fell by 10%. In terms of funding, STEM fields are favoured due to the political discourse surrounding productivity. Between 2010-2011, UK university research in STEM fields was allocated £3,744 million in research grants. This stands in stark contrast to the grants given to the humanities (£82 million) (Bastow et al. 2014). It is clear that our education system favours fields which are deemed to be “profitable”, while those which are not are steadily eroding.
The difference in importance attributed to academic fields once more highlights that the marketisation of education has framed education as solely a means of training a productive labour force. By focusing on the sciences over the humanities throughout students’ education, other important aspects which make education valuable, such as the creation of democratic citizens and greater social cohesion, are being neglected. As Martha Nussbaum (2009, p. 54) writes:
"Initiatives focusing narrowly on scientific and technical training [produce] many generations of useful engineers who haven’t a clue about how to criticize the propaganda of their politicians, and who have even less of a clue about how to imagine the pain that a person feels who has been excluded and subordinated."
For example, in the 2012 US election (information on the UK is not readily available), four out of the five bottom voting rates by college major were found in STEM fields. While the humanities may not be monetisable in the same way STEM fields are, they are nonetheless important. They teach students to be critical and to have empathy for others. Given our current political landscape, they are therefore more vital than ever.
The USS Strike
The current USS strike, which is occurring in the context laid out above, criticises the shift in priorities on part of universities. Moving towards a defined contribution scheme will take monetary risk out of the hands of the universities and place it onto individual lecturers. Such a stance is common in the corporate world, where businesses would rather risk employees’ retirements than their own profits. Making lecturers’ pensions insecure is therefore just a small development in a larger movement towards marketisation.
Furthermore, the reform highlights that our current obsession with economic productivity is not only devaluing certain academic disciplines, but also decreasing the value our society attributes to the role of a lecturer. The government’s response to the strike emphasises the increasingly student/consumer-centred approach to education, with the minister for higher education, Sam Gyimah, calling for monetary compensation for students who have experienced disruptions, while simultaneously asking lecturers to return to work.
No matter how the USS strike ends, it is important for us to take note of the current state of our education system. The way the education system is being run is decreasing the quality of education and suppressing important aspects of education such as working towards greater social cohesion, political citizenship, and equality.
About the author
Inga Steinberg is Jenkins scholar pursuing an MSc in Comparative Social Policy. Prior to Oxford, she completed a BSc in Liberal Arts and Sciences: Global Challenges, majoring in Policy Science at Leiden University College in The Hague. Her bachelor’s thesis explored the relationship between ability grouping in mathematics classes and its effects on the gender mathematics gap in terms of educational achievement. She will further investigate related topics through her research at the department, and wishes to go into a DPhil after graduating.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect any editorial policy.
References
Bastow, S., Dunleavy, P. & Tinkler, J. (2014). The impact of the social sciences: How academics and their research make a difference. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Britton, Jack, Lorraine Dearden, Neil Shephard, and Anna Vignoles. (2016). How English Domiciled Graduate Earnings Vary with Gender, Institution Attended, Subject and Socio-Economic Background. Available at: https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/wps/wp201606.pdf.
Kornell, N., & Hausman, H. (2016). Do the Best Teachers Get the Best Ratings? Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 570.
Mirowski, P. (2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste. How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso Books.
NUS. (2008). NUS Student Experience Report. Available at: https://www.nus.org.uk/PageFiles/4017/NUS_StudentExperienceReport.pdf. Accessed 28/02/2018
Nussbaum, M. (2009). Tagore, Dewey, and the imminent demise of liberal education. In Siegel, H. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (pp. 52-66). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, H. (2008). “Spoon-feeding: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the mess.” Teaching in Higher Education 13(6), 715-718.