After decades of reform, UK higher education is now among the most aggressively marketized higher education systems in the world. As this system visibly crumbles around us, with mass course closures and redundancies, it is time for the proponents of marketisation to take ownership of the crisis UK HE now finds itself in. And, more importantly, it is time for the government to start taking the alternatives to marketisation seriously.

To many in the sector watching this slow but seemingly inevitable crisis unfold, these conclusions may seem almost self-evident. But let us introduce the case. The term marketisation is often used loosely, however, in this context we refer to the architecture of rules, regulation, metrics, rankings, performance measures, and audit rituals that reconstitute ‘education’ and ‘research’ into commodities that can be priced, traded, or exchanged. Crucially, this hard fought process of commodification of education and research allows for competition between institutions for research funding and student numbers. In the sterile, imagined world presented in most introductory economics textbooks this competition achieves the wonderful trick of both improving quality while reducing prices. Asserting this supposed truism, Lord Browne of the 2010 Browne review on the future of funding UK Higher Education, confidently claims in his foreword that “competition generally raises quality”.

The problem with this claim, however, is that the current HE system in the UK fails to achieve several of the necessary assumptions made in economics textbooks. For home tuition fees, for instance, we have a broken pricing mechanism under which almost all institutions in England charge the maximum possible fees. Students, when they apply for courses, are routinely swamped with metrics based sales pitches that, at best, only reinforce already dysfunctional measures of educational quality. Moreover, the cost of living crisis and exploitative rents often price students out of university education outside of their hometowns. Research income, meanwhile, operates almost exclusively as a quasi-market, with complex, bureaucratic, and systemically biased evaluation exercises standing in for consumer choice.

Despite these (rather obvious) issues, the marketisation of UK higher education, and the shift towards a predominantly fee based system, has ground on for decades. Research from the early 2000s already documents the negative effects of an extensive commercialisation of degree programmes. Meanwhile, elaborate performance management and surveillance systems, a growing reliance on competitive grant capture, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessors have only been further extended by the more recent exercises such as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the Knowledge Excellence Framework (KEF), and the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (MEF). Not to mention the growing emphasis on the various university rankings and league tables. Market proponents do love an acronym.

For more than two decades, various studies have shown this to have been a highly costly and often dysfunctional obsession with audit and measurement – with studies finding that this regime produces standardised ‘safe’ research, undermines academic freedom, encourages careerist approaches to research, causes stress and job insecurity,  and is variously discriminatory under equalities legislation. Under the leadership of a business-minded managerial class, such practices also impose a strict economisation of almost every aspect of university life, by which we mean that at almost every moment students and staff are encouraged to evaluate the value of their work in terms of measurable outputs that deliver economic returns to the institution.

This subjectivisation of staff and students, to this performance obsessed market culture, is important as it provides the unspoken rationale for a narrowing of accountability and a foreclosure of debate over how institutions are run.

This brings us to some of the more recent aspects of marketisation that have built upon this architecture of performance measurement to precipitate the current crisis. Following the Browne review, the UK government tripled home fees in England in 2012 to £9,000 while correspondingly cutting direct teaching grants. In 2015 they would then remove ‘student number controls’, freeing institutions to recruit uncapped numbers onto low-cost high-fee courses, before opening the sector to a ‘new wave’ of private providers under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.

Meanwhile, the lack of a cap on the fees that could be charged to international students meant the universities could leverage the prestige and history of UK HE to charge often exorbitant fees to international students. Marketing relatively low-cost courses across Business, Management, Computer Science, Politics and Law, among others, universities aimed to maximise profits at the expense of their students.

This opening-up of the market did lead to an intensification of competition, but not on the basis of the quality of education provided in any meaningful sense. Instead, universities aggressively invested in their physical estates, grew their marketing budgets, engaged consultants, increased the pay of their executives, casualised the workforce on increasingly precarious employment contracts, and opened speculative new overseas campuses. Flush with cash as student fees more than offset cuts to direct government funding, universities leaders then bet the lecture hall (literally) on these good times continuing. Between 2010/11 and 2020/21, UK universities almost trebled their debt, from £5.57 billion to £15.17 billion, often with risky debt covenants attached. They adopted ‘lean’ treasury management strategies, entered into revolving credit facilities, outsourced international recruitment to growing private companies such as KAPLAN and INTO, and subsidiarised their activities into increasingly complex group structures.

Ironically, this business-like group think among university leaders saw universities become much riskier institutions during the financial good times, leaving universities with a risk exposure that would, for many, become untenable when those good times came to an end.

This more or less brings us to our present position. The massification of education that took place under the post-2010 fee based system meant that almost all UK universities adopted a ‘business model’ in which heavily internationalised low-cost high-margin courses were cross subsidising newly ‘loss making’ subjects and research. In the financial good times this was overlooked, but as the international student market tightens, as home fees remain largely frozen, and with the traditional block grant a fraction of what it once was, institutions across the country are making ‘difficult decisions’. On the hook as they are for ambitious debt covenants (effectively financial performance targets) that are no longer achievable.

Perhaps most depressing in all of this is that the proponents of this free market experiment – what Andrew McGeettigan rightly referred to in 2013 as ‘the great university gamble’ – still seem to think they got it right. Via various eugenicist and classist metaphors, mass course closures are reframed as the market filtering out the weak and failing (often post-‘92) institutions are discussed in light of more (presumably working class) students needing to focus on apprenticeships. We need to question, so we are told, what and who a university education is really for.

Aside from the moral, political, and social objections we could make to such arguments, they also simply don’t stand up when analysed through the lens of marketisation itself. Marketisation, we were told in the 2000s, was to fund widening participation. Marketisation, we were told in the 2010s, would bring untold riches to the UK economy. But the reality, and the legacy, is one in which the historic diversity of UK education and scholarship that made it so attractive on the world stage in the first place is now under existential threat. UK universities are sliding down international rankings. Student-staff ratios are rising. Courses are closing. Meanwhile, many lower and middle ranking institutions (often with a much better record of serving their local communities than the Russell Group institution across town) face break up or closure.

The solution? We don’t need higher fees, we need to break the UK Higher Education market. We need to fund, plan, run and assess UK institutions democratically, for the public good. What that looks like is where the real conversation needs to start.