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Academic

Can students simply be consumers?

Credit CardUsing the analogy of requiring effort to go to a gym, higher education requires a significant input from students … they cannot simply “buy” a degree off the shelf:

Professor Enders said he did not believe it was truly possible to create a market in higher education with a range of fees, as the coalition government set out to do in 2010, because “you cannot really know about the value” of a degree.

The difficulty of judging education – whether by the skills it imparts, by the extra income and employability it brings or by some other measure – made it hard accurately to gauge the value of a course, he argued.

Similarly, there was a “problem” with higher education being treated as a “commodity” to be bought and sold by a consumer, Professor Enders said, because university needs some effort on the part of the student.

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By admin

Dr Bex Lewis is passionate about helping people engage with the digital world in a positive way, where she has more than 20 years’ experience. She is Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing at Manchester Metropolitan University and Visiting Research Fellow at St John’s College, Durham University, with a particular interest in digital culture, persuasion and attitudinal change, especially how this affects the third sector, including faith organisations, and, after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2017, has started to research social media and cancer. Trained as a mass communications historian, she has written the original history of the poster Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster (Imperial War Museum, 2017), drawing upon her PhD research. She is Director of social media consultancy Digital Fingerprint, and author of Raising Children in a Digital Age: Enjoying the Best, Avoiding the Worst  (Lion Hudson, 2014; second edition in process) as well as a number of book chapters, and regularly judges digital awards. She has a strong media presence, with her expertise featured in a wide range of publications and programmes, including national, international and specialist TV, radio and press, and can be found all over social media, typically as @drbexl.

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