Organizational Changes in Higher Education: The High Cost of Competition

• In Event: 523 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 17. Educational Programs, Educational Reforms, and Student Research: Session II

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the marketization of higher education on tuition revenues. Drawing on critiques of theories of neoliberalism, we hypothesize that the introduction of market strategies as vehicles for competing for student dollars decreases organizational revenues and limits access for low-income students. Using fixed effects models, we measure within-institution changes over time, examining the impact of tuition discounting, the increase in the proportion of an operating budget spent on student services, and debt loads on net tuition. We also measure the effect of tuition and government reliance on efforts to recruit students. As expected, we found that some of the practices that colleges and universities have developed to compete for students in the marketplace, tuition discounting, and spending on student services, in particular, have not served them well. Thus, we conclude that the idea of the market as the most efficient vehicle for allocating resources, institutionalized as a common sense understanding by the neoliberal turn, does not serve higher education very well.

Authors

• Beth Mintz, University of Vermont

• Daniel Krymkowski, University of Vermont