Session Information
23 SES 09 A, Research Politics and Higher Education Reform (Part 1)
Paper Session
Contribution
Critiques of public policy, that has introduced market logic to public institutions, and in particular a focus on the ‘customer’, are by now familiar. Parents, patients, and passengers (as well as students) are now customers (Du Gay and Salaman 1992: 622). And the customer has acquired the status of ‘queen’ rather than ‘pawn’, while public sector workers are ‘knaves’ rather than ‘knights’ (Le Grand 2003). Within research on higher education (HE) such critiques have focused both on the impact of new management practices on academic work and identity (e.g. Archer 2008, Clegg 2008, Petersen 2009) and on the changing experiences of students (e.g. Naidoo and Jameison 2005, Montgomery and Canaan 2004, and Canaan 2004, Leathwood and O’Connell 2003). Such studies document processes of change in HE but do not explicitly critique the discourse of ‘the student experience’ which is increasingly dominant and sets ‘the student’ in opposition to the vested interest of the knave-like academics (Sabri 2010a).
This paper begins with an analysis of ‘the student experience’ in UK public policy discourse, and compares its use in documents relating to the creation of a European Higher Education Area. Within the UK this discourse has, through funding initiatives and other authority structures, sanctioned and legitimated a limited conception of the experience of students in HE which treats them as rational technical learners. The recent ‘Browne Review’ of HE funding in England positions ‘the student experience’ as a component of students’ ‘public information needs’ that are central to the ‘increase’ of ‘student choice’. Thus ‘the student experience’ plays a pivotal role in the policy rationale that underpins the marketisation of HE. The currency of ‘the student experience’ has long been prevalent in quasi-governmental agencies in the UK such as the Quality Assurance Agency and Higher Education Academy and it is possible to trace its establishment within institutional discourses through a range quality assurance and enhancement policy initiatives relating to teaching.
The paper then focuses on the way in which the UK’s National Student Survey has added allocative and sanctioning power to ‘the student experience’ by becoming a barely contestable ‘measure’ of students’ experience. Unlike the use of student evaluations of teaching elsewhere which are integrated with other data sets (e.g. Germany’s CHE University Rankings), the NSS elevates a limited conception of the student experience above other accounts of HE. Drawing on the sociology of statistics, I argue that both the discourse and the statistical output of the NSS have gained legitimacy and acquired meanings that far outweigh the validity or intended use of the NSS. With the help of the NSS, as an instrument of policy and audit, ‘the student experience’ has acquired an increasingly powerful meaning-giving and sanctioning role. This is evident at an institutional level in the level of resource that is now allocated to improving ‘the student experience’ and in the extent to which relative positions in NSS league tables have become fact-totems (de Santos 2009) which have come to redefine higher education work and relationships.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
de Santos, M. (2010). Fact-totems and the statistical imagination: The public life of a statistic in Argentina 2001. Sociological Theory 27(4): 466-489. Du Gay, P. and G. Salaman (1992). "The cult(ure) of the customer." Journal of Management Studies 29(5): 615-633. Espeland, W. N. and M. Sauder (2007). Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology 113(1): 1-40. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis and Social Research. London: Routledge. Le Grand, J. (2003). Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Montgomery, L. M. and J. E. Canaan (2004). "Conceptualizing higher education students as social actors in a globalizing world: A special issue." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 17(6): 739 - 748. Petersen, E. B. (2009). Resistance and enrolment in the enterprise university: an ethno-drama in three acts, with appended reading. Journal of Education Policy 24(4): 409-422. Ramsden, P., D. Batchelor, Peacock, A, Temple, P, Watson, D. (2010). Enhancing and Developing the National Student Survey. London, Centre for Higher Education Studies, Institute of Education. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2010/rd12_10/ Sabri, D (2010a) Absence of the Academic from Higher Education Policy, Journal of Education Policy 25(2): 191-205
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