The hyper-commodification of higher education in England in cross-nationally comparative perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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in England has become increasingly commodified in recent decades as public spending on universities and students has been replaced by loans for tuition fees and student maintenance repayable by higher education participants cast as private consumers.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 Policy 22 (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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".