Making digital market through open data platform: Struggling universities and student choice

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Navigating Higher Education Rankings, Ethics, Competition, and Talent Development

Proposal

Introduction
In recent years, higher education (HE) systems around the world have been increasingly reshaped by the rise of the open government movement. Advocating for the public’s right to access information, this movement aims to enhance transparency, accountability, and public participation, making government processes more accessible (Attard et al., 2015). In response to growing scepticism about the legitimacy of governance, numerous governments have launched ‘open data’ platforms. These platforms are not merely about transparency; they also integrates market-oriented agendas into the HE system, allowing stakeholders like students and private sector partners to clearly ‘see’ institutional performance, fostering an environment where transparency and market principles coalesce. This means, on the one hand, the datafication and digitalisation have rendered universities into governable entities by quantifying intricate practices into measurable performance data. On the other hand, the public release of such data has significantly enhanced connectivity amongst various stakeholders, sparking a surge in new market-driven products and industries. Students, like consumers, can use this data to benchmark, compare, and make informed decisions about their educational investments, such as choosing university programmes.
Data openness is particularly crucial when the HE market is in crisis. In East Asia, a confluence of oversupply in university provision and a plummeting birth rate has severely impacted HE systems across Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.(see also Welch, 2024). Private sector universities, in particular, have been grappling with an escalating financial crisis, leading to numerous closures. This issue reached a critical point in Taiwan in 2014 when two private universities unexpectedly shut down, leaving students scrambling to find new admissions to continue their studies and the authorities made belated audits. This situation exacerbated public concern as reports indicated that several more institutions might soon close, yet the lack of advance information made students vulnerably uninformed. To counter this, the University and College Information Disclosure Platform (UCIDP) was established in 2015 by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Unlike typical open data platforms that primarily drive performance excellence through market mechanisms, UCIDP uniquely aims to ‘bridge the information gap between institutions and students, thereby safeguarding the educational rights of students by making information about universities publicly available’ (MOE, 2015, p.1).
This paper employs Foucauldian scholarship and Callon and Muniesa’s (2005) ‘market-making’ to investigate the social-material dimension of UCIDP and its governing effects on the HE system in Taiwan. While extensive literature has examined the shift in HE governance from state-led towards market-driven systems, the interplay between data infrastructures, digital technologies, and transparency – and their intertwined influence on universities – has been relatively underexplored. This study shifts focus from conventional explorations of HE governance, which often overlook policy tools and instruments, to the subtle yet powerful ‘“indirect mechanisms” that shape and normalise social, economic and personal conduct’ (Miller & Rose, 1990, p.2; emphasis in original). Engaging with Callon and Muniesa’s (2007) theorising of market, the paper argues that markets are not inherent and pre-existing entities; they must be made – in concrete contexts and conditions – by market devices comprising both material and discursive components. The purpose of this study is therefore to address three key issues: a) what kind of market is constructed by UCIDP; b) how universities are rendered calculable for student choice; and c) how universities govern themselves in response to the UCIDP-driven market.

Methodology and Methods
This study draws upon the network ethnography – wherein researchers examine education policies, online documents, multimedia contents, and data infrastructures to better understand how social-material assemblages form and function – to explore the digital marketspace created by UCIDP and the calculative practices of universities. Data sources include semi-structured interviews and document analysis. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of UCIDP and its impact on universities. This empirical research protocol received approval from the University Human Research Ethics Committee. For participant recruitment, initial contact was made via email, providing an outline of the research proposal and a Participant Information Statement. Interview participants included eight policymakers, nine university executives (four from the public sector and five from the private sector), and one senior union officer. All participants were (in)directly involved in the decision-making process regarding university place allocation at either the governmental or institutional level. Second, this study involved an extensive examination of a large archive of documents, texts, and various forms of material. This archive includes government annual reports, press releases, published interviews, government media coverage, in-house research reports, commissioned reports by external experts, research findings, reports produced in partnership with other organisations, the website, and specific product webpages.

Research Findings
The preliminary findings suggest two key insights. First, while the decreasing population has continued to impact the HE system in Taiwan, it has demonstrated how the rise of data transparency has reconstructed, redefined, and re-instrumentalised the strategies by which universities are governed as well as self-governance. Second, due to the nature of data openness, universities, while being rendered into numbers for comparison, can access the performance data of others and make various projections. This calculative agency is essential for university management teams to internally govern their departments by adjusting the number of university places amongst outperforming and underperforming programmes, thus avoiding reductions in places and preserving their reputations.


References
Attard, J., Orlandi, F., Scerri, S., & Auer, S. (2015). A systematic review of open government data initiatives. Government Information Quarterly, 32, 399-418.
Callon, M., & Muniesa, F. (2005). Peripheral vision: Economic markets as calculative collective devices. Organization Studies, 26(8), 1229-1250.
Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149000000001
Ministry of Education. (2015). UCIDP: Understanding universities starts here. MOE
Welch, A. (2024). East Asia's private higher education crisis: Demography as destiny? Higher Education Quarterly, 1-16.

Author

• Ren-Hao Xu, University of Western Australia