Last April, the
OECD
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) published its “
Thematic Review of Tertiary Education
” under the title “
Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society
“. Unlike other studies by this organisation, such as the infamous
PISA Report
(pardon the alliteration), this document has stirred up very little dust in the media, yet we sense that it will have a major influence on international education policies. It is for this reason that we have boldly set out to write a short commentary on the summary of the original document published by the OECD itself (we have not had the time or the guts to read the full report :P).
However, reading this abridged version gives us a fairly clear idea of the report’s objectives. Based on a preliminary study carried out mainly in
Firstly, the direct connection of tertiary education with the production system, especially with regard to research and development, going so far as to suggest the inclusion of business representatives in the planning bodies of educational institutions, and especially when designing curricula.
And secondly, the internationalisation of the tertiary education system, again with special emphasis on R, and pointing to the preponderant role of multinational companies in this area. This internationalisation should be accompanied by the mobility of both teachers and students.
Without having more data than that provided by the report itself, we deduce that the reforms it alludes to are aimed at a certain liberalisation of the sector. In this process, the state continues to play an important role; as with other economic sectors, national states are expected to, so to speak, “modulate” and “lubricate” the process of pseudo-liberalisation through the application of certain policies.
A rather striking indicator of this hidden proposal for the commodification of higher education that we believe we find in the OECD report is already found in the title of the document itself. It refers to “Tertiary Education” and its “institutions” instead of ‘Higher Education’ and the ‘Institution’ that has managed it until now: the University. By “Tertiary Education Institutions” the OECD refers (and does so explicitly) to a type of institution that has been created “to develop a closer relationship between tertiary education and the outside world, including greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs of the labour market“. In this typology, the OECD includes “institutions such as polytechnics, university colleges or technological institutes.”
One of the lines of action that, according to the OECD, states could follow is the promotion of competitiveness between institutions, and it even proposes that governments should financially incentivise those institutions with the best results. Although this drastic measure is dropped in passing, the report dedicates an extensive section to quality control, both intra-institutional and external through audits. Thus, it is easy to see that control and bureaucratic inspection by the State are replaced by competition between the tertiary education institutions themselves as a way of ensuring and improving the quality of education, a mechanism in which the free choice of students also plays a decisive role.
In this scenario of pseudo-commodification of higher, or tertiary, education, the OECD’s strong commitment to a tertiary education system co-financed by the State and the students themselves fits perfectly. One of the main reasons that the OECD puts forward in defence of co-financing is that this system allows for the redistribution of the individual wealth that students would obtain thanks to a degree financed in part with public money. It is true that the report offers measures to correct the inequalities that this system is sure to accentuate and also produce, however, the disastrous consequences that student debt is having in countries such as the United Kingdom are becoming well known (a phenomenon that we talked about right here).
Looking at the approaches and the development of the
Bologna Process
, it is clear how the policies for the creation of a
European Higher Education Area
align perfectly with the OECD’s proposals and lead to the complete integration of the education system into the market. Until now, the critical voices against this process have focused their discourse on the defence of the public university. This defence is clearly necessary and urgent; it is clear that higher education should effectively revert to the benefit of all (and let no one tell us that the benefit of the business sector trickles down to society as a whole and that kind of sophistry), however, it seems necessary to us to exercise a radical critique and think about what substantial difference exists between an education system controlled by the Market and one controlled by the State, and whether it is possible to think of autonomous and collective forms of knowledge construction, which is what we should be talking about, in short, when we talk about education.