Participation in higher education (HE) is commonly framed as both a democratic right and an economic investment in future income potential. Scholars of HE frequently debate the relation between higher education as a public good (both for political civic engagement and economic skills capacity at a collective level) and as a private good providing economic returns to individuals (cf. Marginson, 2011). While many hold elements of both positions, the discourse of HE as a guarantor of upward economic mobility is hegemonic. However, higher education students internationally are seeing a falling ‘rate of return’ on realising their HE qualifications on the labour market (a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘academic inflation’), despite ongoing narratives of the need to ‘widen access’ (what Dan Greene [2021] has described as ‘the Access Doctrine’). There is thus a gap between dominant discourses surrounding higher education (‘participation is necessary and suZicient for future returns’; ‘participation is a means to addressing social inequalities’) and the material reality of students’ experiences on qualifying and realising their HE symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 1990). This scepticism as to the doxa of HE is further bolstered by uncertainty around future labour practices in the light of nascent AI technologies. In this paper, I use the language of Bourdieu to argue that the field of higher education under such conditions exhibits properties similar to a Ponzi scheme, namely strictly upward expansionism and belief in reward for participation coupled with dwindling return on personal investment. By looking at the UK and South African cases, I question whether such a schema is on the edge of collapse, as new recruits (future students) begin to question the hegemonic doxa of participation propagated by those who have gone before them in light of falling rates of return for increasing personal cost. By exposing this unsustainable growth dynamic, the position of higher education in relation to economic opportunity and labour markets is troubled.

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