It is now widely held, in England at least, that students are considered by policymakers, and perhaps also by other stakeholders in the higher education sector, as consumers (e.g. Molesworth et al., 2009; Nixon et al., 2016). This assumption is based largely on the nature of the policies introduced over the past twenty years – particularly the requirement that most students now make a substantial financial contribution to the cost of their higher education, and the availability of an increasingly wide range of metrics to encourage students actively to ‘shop around’ when making their choices about institution and course. While such analyses are important in delineating the broad direction of change within English higher education policy, they rarely explore the ‘messiness’ of policy, and the internal contradictions that can sometimes arise. Indeed, most policies can be considered ‘ramshackle, compromise hit and miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered with, nuanced and inflected through complex processes of influence’ (Ball, 2007, p.44). By adopting a fine-grained, discursive approach, this paper seeks to examine the extent to which coherent understandings of students are formulated within current English higher education policy and assess the dominance of the ‘consumer’ construction, in particular. It also explores whether alternative conceptualisations of the student are advanced, beyond that of the consumer. In addition, the paper considers the extent to which understandings – held by government but also other key stakeholders, namely staff and student unions, and representatives of business and graduate employers – converge. In doing so, it recognises that government policy pronouncements are rarely straightforwardly transferred into practice. Instead, they are enacted by relevant actors who interpret, translate and sometimes resist policy imperatives (Ball et al., 2011).

There is now compelling evidence that educational policies do not determine student subjectivities in any direct and straightforward sense. Indeed, Clarke et al. (2007) have argued that political subjects are not ‘docile bodies’; rather, they should be considered as reflexive subjects who can contest the way they are constructed in policy, sometimes offering their own redefinitions. In the UK, numerous studies have indicated that there is no simple relationship between the provision of information and the knowledge acquired (and decisions made) by prospective students (e.g. Dodds, 2011). Nevertheless, it is also the case that while policies rarely act in a simple, deterministic manner, their influence is often significant. Ball (2007), for example, argues that policies are articulated ‘both to achieve material effects and to manufacture support for these effects’ (p.41). They are ways of representing, accounting for and legitimating political decisions; a means of classifying and regulating the spaces and subjects they hope to govern (Ball, 2007). Policies can also have effects beyond those intended by the authors – what Shore and Wright (2011) call ‘runaway effects’ – actively reshaping understandings and practices in the environments in which they are introduced. Dominant constructions of students are thus likely to exert some influence. Indeed, a considerable number of scholars have argued that students’ relationships to higher education have been fundamentally altered by their positioning, within policy, as consumers, and the reshaping of the sector in general along market lines. Tomlinson (2016), for example, has contended that some HE students, at least, have adopted what he calls an ‘active service-user attitude’ – emphasising both their rights and the importance of obtaining value for money. Analysis of dominant constructions within policy is thus important, not just in helping to understand in more detail how policymakers (and other key policy actors) conceptualise students, but in exploring the representations that are likely to have at least some impact on the shaping of contemporary higher education institutions.

Ball, S. (2007) Big policies/small world. An introduction to international perspectives in education policy, in: Lingard, B. and Ozga, J. (eds) The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Education Policy and Politics London, Routledge, pp. 36-47. Ball, S., Maguire, M., Braun, A. and Hoskins, K. (2011) Policy actors: doing policy work in schools, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32, 4, 625-639. Brooks, R., Byford, K. and Sela, K. (2015) The changing role of students’ unions within contemporary higher education, Journal of Education Policy, 30, 2, 165-181. Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E. and Westmarland, L. (2007) Creating Citizen-Consumers London, Sage. Collini, S. (2012) What are Universities For? London, Penguin. Dodds, A. (2011) The British Higher Education Funding Debate: the perils of ‘talking economics’, London Review of Education, 9, 3, 317-331. Molesworth, M., Nixon, E. and Scullion, E. (2009) The marketization of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer, Teaching in Higher Education, 14, 3, 277-287. Nixon, E., Scullion, R. and Hearn, R. (2016) Her majesty the student: marketised higher education and the narcisstic (dis)satisfactions of the student-consumer, Studies in Higher Education (Advance online access). Shore, C. and Wright, S. (2011) Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of Visibility, in: Shore, C., Wright, S. and Però, D. (eds) Policy Worlds. Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power New York, Berghahn Books. Tomlinson, M. (2016) Students’ perceptions of themselves as ‘consumers’ of higher education, British Journal of Sociology of Education (advance online access). Williams, J. (2013) Consuming Higher Education. Why Learning Can’t Be Bought. London: Bloomsbury.