The abject failure of marketisation in higher education

The enormous sums spent by many universities on marketing should come as no surprise (Report, 3 April). Nor should the fact that it is mostly the less prestigious institutions that are doing most of the spending. Like grade inflation, the rise in unconditional offers and vastly inflated vice-chancellors’ salaries, it is the direct, foreseeable and foreseen consequence of the marketisation that began with the removal of the subsidy for overseas students in 1980, as described in my 2013 book with Helen Carasso, Everything for Sale: The Marketisation of UK Higher Education.Short of a wholesale reversal of such policies, the only solution is for the universities to agree, and the Office for Students to police, what share of their income to spend on activities that do not directly support student education. The fact that such an arrangement would be anathema to a neoliberal government shows only that they and their advisers fail to appreciate that markets in higher education are not economic markets, where the players compete for resources, but status markets, where the players compete for reputation, and where state action is needed to protect the “consumers” from the diversion of resources that such activities as marketing represent.