Knowing your ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty in UK Higher Education

ABSTRACT

In the UK and elsewhere, higher education is increasingly and controversially being construed, especially within political discourse, as a marketised commodity service to paying customers. Notions of quality, broadly construed, will be of central significance in the development of new markets in higher education in the UK and beyond. Drawing upon economic theory and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper considers specifically the issues of quality mechanisms in relation to quality uncertainty and informational asymmetry within the emerging market for UK higher education, and the effects of these upon both students as ‘buyers’ and institutions as ‘sellers’ alike. Emergent counteracting quality mechanisms within the higher education sector that are aimed, in part, at reducing quality uncertainty are considered and a critique is presented of the shortcomings of emerging mechanisms such as league tables. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how both students and higher education providers might wrest back control over such mechanisms and work towards the diminution of quality uncertainty and informational asymmetry.

Keywords:

• Commodification of learning
• quality uncertainty
• informational asymmetry
• marketing of higher education

Notes

[1] These results are factored into the overall metric employed to determine the relative standings of universities in the league tables compiled by The Times, and are reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement of 9 June 2006. It should be noted that the same data support different overall metrics in, for example, other publications.