The hyper-commodification of higher education in England in cross-nationally comparative perspective

Abstract

Higher education in the UK and particularly in England has become increasingly commodified in recent decades as public spending on universities and students has been replaced by loans for tuition fees and student maintenance repayable by higher education participants cast as private consumers. A study by Willemse, N., & De Beer, P. in Journal of European Social Policy22(2), 105–117, (2012) drawing on 2007 data for nineteen countries showed that cross-national differences in the extent of higher education commodification mapped strongly on to the welfare regimes typology developed by Esping-Anderson, with Liberal regimes including the UK/England the most commodified, Social Democratic regimes the least commodified, and Conservative regimes somewhere in between. We build on this previous study to explore change between 2007 and 2020 in the extent of higher education commodification across the same nineteen countries, encompassing six Liberal (Australia, Canada, the UK/England, Ireland, New Zealand and the USA), nine Conservative (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain), and four Social Democratic regimes (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden). We find a substantively large increase in the commodification of higher education between 2007 and 2020 in just one of these countries: the Liberal regime of the UK/England. The magnitude of this shift is such that we suggest that the English higher education system now stands apart from other Liberal regimes by virtue of its hyper-commodification.