College education

One can envisage universities (and others) attracting students with all kinds of impressive features and promises, then delivering the minimum and fending off the (presumably undocumented, or at least not publicly listed) complaints with impenetrable customer support services. Anyone who has tried to escape a mobile phone contract or who has been on the end of a computer manufacturer's customer helpline will understand this concept quite well (Katzer, Cook, and Crouch, 1998).

Doubtless, many students would prefer to avoid the 'hard' bits of their courses. But often these are the most necessary. Academic standards may be undermined if universities are competing to appeal to students as consumers by avoiding the difficult or less appealing aspects of a subject. Similarly, universities may be less inclined to take a tough stance or adhere to common criteria on degree standards, plagiarism and assessment because they worry that their customers are liable to complain or leave (Katzer, Cook, and Crouch, 1998).

However, the fundamental flaw and unjustified tenet of the White Paper is that the system will improve because "the funding will follow the choices of the student". There is no reason to believe that the choices of students will result in either a short term or long term optimization of the higher education system. There is good reason (and research on social dilemmas) to believe that students' immediate preferences will not satisfy their own interests, let alone those of future generations of students or society as a whole. In fact, the personally rational choices made by individuals are quite likely to result in significant costs and losses for the collective (Rodriguez and Toews, 2005).

In this case, the collective represents not only other students but also universities as a whole. Students (who are essentially anonymous individuals) do not have a strategic overview of higher education, have no way of knowing how their individual choices will have a cumulative or combined effect, or any way of understanding how far those effects will reach. They are neither involved in, nor have any way of articulating their views on, these issues. Letting the market run free is fine when the products are essentially replaceable, substitutable and disposable (one supermarket closes, another trades in its place, a Tesco in Cumbria is indistinguishable from a Tesco anywhere else, its cucumbers are always the same). It is not fine when the 'products', in this case academic expertise, culture and our very institutions, take years to build, to develop and to become strong. Prioritizing "following the choices of the student" may well lead to a system which is fragmented, divided and divisive, one that offers only a partial education to many students, one that has little regional sensitivity, and that is trapped into pursuing only those educational values that can be monetized (Rodriguez and Toews, 2005).

References

Katzer, J., K. H. Cook, and W. W. Crouch. 1998. Evaluating information: A guide for users of social science research. 4th ed. Boston:McGraw-Hill

Rodriguez, A., & Toews, M. L. (2005). Training students to be better consumers of research: Evaluating empirical research reports. College Teaching, 53(3), 99-101.