Abstract
One could be excused for failing to recognise today’s universities as the inheritors of the global higher education system that arose more than 70 years ago from the ashes of the Second World War. A wave of post-war optimism ushered in a global movement with a utopian vision in which arbitrary divisions such as class, gender and race would be transcended in the pursuit of academic enlightenment (Scott, 1995). Universities were to be one of the key drivers of this change. But, contemporary academia is a distinctly different beast. The enlightenment values of the liberal education model, once the dominant philosophy in universities across the world, are gradually being supplanted by a consumerist ideology (Furedi, 2011): Yesterday’s ‘Cathedrals of learning’ are being replaced by today’s ‘Supermarkets of facts’.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
A wave of post-war optimism ushered in a global movement with a utopian vision in which arbitrary divisions such as class, gender, and race would be transcended in the pursuit of academic enlightenment (Scott, 1995)
By advocating a consumerist philosophy, managers of Higher Education (HE) institutions have been able to employ the full gamut of market forces to drive innovation in their day-to-day practice (Christensen and Eyring, 2011)
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Most important of all from the consumer model perspective, “What do students expect from HE and how are education providers framing and meeting these expectations?” The key metric for this last question is student satisfaction, yet, despite its almost ubiquitous position as a tool for university managers, the concept of “student satisfaction” remains ephemeral and surprisingly little is known about what makes a student satisfied with their experience of HE or how it can be measured effectively.
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