The Marketisation of English Higher Education

This book traces the development of marketized higher education in England since the mid-1980s and identifies five stages of market reforms culminating in the Higher Education and Research Act, which introduced the risk of institutional exit to the competitive market system established by earlier policy change. It analyzes policy statements from this 30-year period to explore arguments for higher education policy that account for the ways the marketization has been used to create the complex differentiated system that exists today, outlining five stages of marketization policy that moved from efficiency and accountability, to diversity, to differentiation. It considers whether there has been a continuity of policy from the encouragement of public expenditure efficiency and accountability in the 1980s to the emphasis on competition and risk in 2017; whether there was an intention among policymakers that the system move through stages of marketization; whether marketization has developed in response to factors beyond the control of policymakers; the role of the introduction of tuition fees paid by students; and what the English case reveals about the nature of neoliberalism for future trajectories of other national systems in marketizing and differentiating their institutions.