Undergraduate orientations towards higher education in Germany and England: problematizing the notion of ‘student as customer’.

Author(s):

Richard Budd(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 05 D, Students in Transition and Their Values

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

11:00-12:30

Room:

340. [Main]

Chair:

Serap Emil

Contribution

There is a great deal of concern in the academic literature that neoliberal conditions in higher education frame students as customers. Observers are of the view that rankings and marketing, an increased focus on student satisfaction, and particularly tuition fees, encourage an instrumental, passive attitude towards a university education. There is, though, relatively little scholarship that examines this issue empirically. Some researchers predicted a customer orientation in students and sought to generate evidence to confirm this assumption, while other work has taken an inductive approach and is beginning to paint a more nuanced picture. It appears that some of the expectations of this customer orientation may be realised, but that this can also be mediated by the presence of other dispositions. This study examines the rationales and orientations of undergraduates in Germany and England, where the diffusion of neoliberalism in higher education policies has been somewhat varied. Through interviews with students at 'Mill University' in England and 'Feuerbach Universität' in Germany, an exploration and analysis of decisions they made was undertaken. England's story of tuition fees has seen them introduced, rise, and rise again, while Germany dabbled briefly but abandoned the experiment. The two higher education sectors also have different histories of stratification, with vertical differentiation long a feature in the UK and virtually unknown in Germany until recently. To what extent were the students passive and/or instrumental, and were there significant differences between the students in each country?

Method

Participants were selected from a research-intensive university in each country of similar size (15-20,000 students), and orientation (comprehensive but more STEM-focused. A series of semi-structured interviews with vignettes were adopted as the mode of data collection. 13 undergraduate participants - six German, seven English - were interviewed twice, at length, about their understanding of the higher education context, the rationales behind the decisions they made before and at university, and on their personal histories and experiences as students. The frame for analysis in this case centres largely on the twin dimensions of instrumentalism and passivity suggested by the literature. The students discussed, among other things, their pre-university backgrounds, their understandings and experience of their local and national/broader higher education contexts, and their rationales for actions such as going to university, their choice of university and subject, and other activities. By examining these aspects of their accounts, an understanding of their varying decisions - and in some cases 'non-decisions' was developed, as was a picture of the role that they saw the university as playing in their time at university.

Expected Outcomes

The English students were in some ways more instrumental and expected more from their university, and based on the current literature on this topic, this might have been attributed to the more marketised UK university context. However, the distinctions between the groups were less based on those countries’ unequal engagement with tuition fees and rankings and more on other contrasting aspects of their university cultures. Furthermore, the analysis of the students’ orientations shows that the current conceptualisation of this topic is insufficient in addressing how students might approach their time at university. It will be argued that if ‘student as customer’ is to provide an appropriate shorthand, it requires a more nuanced approach.

References

Adnett, N. & Davies, P., 2002. Education as a Positional Good: implications for Market-Based Reforms of State Schooling. British Journal of Educational Studies, 50(2), pp.189–205. Delucchi, M. & Korgen, K., 2002. “We’re the Customers-We Pay the Tuition”: Student Consumerism among Undergraduate Sociology Majors. Teaching Sociology, 30(1), pp.100–107. Hazelkorn, E., 2008. Learning to Live with League Tables and Ranking : The Experience of Institutional Leaders. Higher Education Policy, 21, pp.193–215. Marginson, S., 2006. Investment in the self : The government of student financing in Australia. Studies in Higher Education, 22(2), pp.37–41. Naidoo, R., Shankar, A. & Veer, E., 2011. The consumerist turn in higher education: Policy aspirations and outcomes. Journal of Marketing Management, 27(11-12), pp.1142–1162. Pritchard, R., 2011. Neoliberal Development in Higher Education: The United Kingdom and Germany, Oxford: Peter Lang. Reay, D., David, M.E. & Ball, S.J., 2005. Degrees of Choice. Class, race, gender and higher education., Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. White, N.R., 2007. “The customer is always right?”: Student discourse about higher education in Australia. Higher Education, 54, pp.593–604.

Author Information

Richard Budd (presenting / submitting)

University of Bristol

Bristol

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