Students as Consumers - Guardian competition entry

This is an entry to a Guardian blog competition focussing on the idea that with rising tuition fees, universities will become overly consumerist.


Picture the university of tomorrow as being a realm of consumerism, a marketplace of education where everything is for sale. This university has, in essence, become less a sanctum of learning and self-discovery, and more a vast conformist shopping centre.

Forgetting for a moment tuition fees, the learning process whilst at university is intrinsically collectivist - everyone is entitled to and receives the same calibre of education as each other, leaving it to the students themselves to determine their level of individual engagement. Suppose then, that capitalistic tendencies begin to develop; slowly at first, like water seeping into cracks but, with similar alacrity, gradually exfoliating their way into the institutional core. Once this slow gain is fully established, universities will have become a true arena of consumerism.

Instead of, or perhaps on top of, tuition fees, there will be pay-as-you-go lectures; each student swiping members cards upon their entrance, the fee being debited accordingly before leaving. Cottoning on to the money-making potential for such pedagogic trading; learning materials, lecturer ‘face time’, and facilities will all be available on a tiered scale of quality to cost. More lucrative exam pointers? Pay this fee. Want your coursework assessed faster and with more detailed feedback? This is the extra surcharge...

Naturally, students will resort to means of avoiding getting caught in such a spider’s web of exploitative fees. In the same way that the digital era sent the creative arts industries into spasms of shock, so the next frontier of piracy will be education. Lecture attendances will drop as materials are redistributed illegally amongst the online fraternity. It will then be down to desperate sales experts to conjure up incentive schemes to entice larger audience numbers once again – bargain tutorials, 2-for-1 lectures, special discounts on learning materials, and so on.

Perhaps regimented degree courses will lose their foothold on the marketplace and instead, greater consumer choice will result in students being free to pick and choose from a whole spectrum of academia, as though they were passing from shop to shop on the High Street. A morning spent examining forensic samples could be followed by an afternoon analysing private company accounts. Indeed, why be confined by a single institution? With the adequate funds you could, for example, study English at Oxford for two days each week, coupled with three days of History at Durham, and then maybe the odd afternoon of Sports Science at Loughborough.

Of course with this tidal shift will come consumer’s rights. Students will develop expectations and adopt the indignation of disgruntled shoppers waving receipts in the air and demanding full cash refunds if they fail to be adequately met.

If students will inevitably feel disenfranchised by these developments then so too will university staff. They will be forced to enrol in swathes of customer services training, whilst sales teams will take up residence in the offices of professors, extolling the virtues of new marketing techniques. University deans will become slaves to charts and spend hours in boardrooms tossing forth strategies on how to escalate the sales figures of second year Anthropology modules.

No longer will lecturers simply be able to rely on their expertise within their chosen field; they will be required to possess a showmanship zeal for which they will be constantly rated alongside their rival colleagues. Instead of simply relying on tired Powerpoint slides, each lecture must be a performance, a revelatory experience captured on a hundred iPhones.

In the final analysis, the university of tomorrow will be the realisation of a revolution, whereby old-fashioned meritocracy is torn down by the almighty modern hands of purchase power.