The University Student in a Reflexive Society: Consequences of Consumerism and Competition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In what follows I argue that, with the transformation from elite to mass university systems, the consumer role is ascendant, especially as higher education systems become more institutionally diverse, complex, inclusive and expansive. In this environment, students and their patrons (parents, governments, etc.) demand more responsive and flexible institutional forms, which some sociologists have argued reflects the advent of an increasingly reflexive society. In the case of universities, the result of social reflexivity is an inevitable blurring of some important boundaries, especially those between the external and internal values of the academic culture. In this context it is not surprising that students are more directly and exclusively focused on the utilitarian value of education, and its role as a gateway to occupational opportunities and social prestige. However, I propose that student consumerism need not be a threat to academic communities, especially in a public university system like that of Canadas. In particular, wise government policies concerning student financing and institutional competition can help to avoid some of the crises emerging in market-oriented systems like that of the United States.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".