Putting Business at the Heart of Higher Education: On Neoliberal Interventionism and Audit Culture in UK Universities

Neoliberalism is a form of interventionism that seeks to pursue elite – corporate – interests. This means constructing a market rationality and constructing markets to better meet what the state takes to be elite interests. In the first phase of neoliberal interventionism in English higher education maintenance grants were replaced with loans, the National Student Survey was introduced to measure ‘satisfaction’, and the inadvertent creation of a £9000 fee-norm all helped to construct a market rationality in students. The second phase, which concerns the proposed reconstruction of the higher education market, started in November 2015 with the publication of the ‘Fulfilling our Potential’ Green Paper. This proposes to make it less bureaucratically cumbersome for ‘for-profits’ to enter the market. In terms of audit culture, a Teaching Excellence Framework is proposed, which would include representatives from employers and professional groups, along with academic experts on teaching, and students, on the assessment panels. Further, universities need to be ‘open to involving employers and learned societies representing professions in curriculum design [and developing] a positive work ethic, so [graduates] can contribute more effectively to our efforts to boost the productivity of UK economy’ (BIS, 2015(a): 11). The Green Paper also holds that ‘at least 20% of graduates are not working in high skilled employment three and a half years after graduation and most employers of STEM graduates are concerned about shortages of high quality applicants’ (BIS 2015(a): 10–11). This contributes to prior messages from the Conservatives that non-STEM subjects are less useful for employment.