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It
is fashionable nowadays to speak of the higher education
system in the United States as the model that deserves
emulation everywhere else in the world. It is regularly
portrayed, in the international media, as the most dynamic,
successful and attractive of all such systems in any
country. In India the queues of students lining up to
join that system seem to grow longer and longer, regardless
of very high and rising costs of such education, or
practical concerns such as visa difficulties.
How did this state of affairs come about? A recent book
by a Professor at the University of Florida suggests
that it is all about successful branding, and throws
into sharp relief the process by which such brand positioning
has come to dominate all higher educational activities
in the US.
''Branded Nation: The marketing of Megachurch, College,
Inc., and Museumworld'' by James B. Twitchell (Simon
and Schuster Paperbacks 2004) is all about the significance
of branding in the culture industries, including those
that have been traditionally seen as far too ''high-brow''
or ''spiritual'' to actually descend to slugging it put
in the market place.
Twitchell ably dissects the increasingly desperate advertising
moves of organised religion and the more suave and sophisticated
branding of high art and museums. But the most fascinating
part of his book - and indeed the most instructive for
us in the developing world - is his tart, cynical and
at times fulminating exposé of the business of
higher education in America.
Given demographic changes, higher education in the USA
should be going through a period of contraction if earlier
ratios of enrolment had been maintained. To sustain
the expansion that is now built into the system, colleges
and universities have to attract more students than
they did previously, and they have sought to do so by
enlarging the pool of potential entrants. One route
is to ensure greater diversity from within the population
- so more women, blacks, ethnic minorities. Another
route is to attract those outside the national population
- therefore the significance of foreign students.
It is of course no secret that all this requires branding.
Twitchell's achievement is to show how this has caused
a central change in the way American universities are
organised. As the experience of higher education gets
commercialised, outsourced and franchised, what is being
delivered is no longer knowledge so much as a brand,
with all the consumer identification markers that this
entails. So the central figure in the delivery is no
longer the professor, but the professional manager.
And the largest department in most universities is now
the ''development'' department, concerned with the raising
and management of funds.
All this has changed the earlier pyramidal structure
of higher education. The sector is therefore now structured,
according to Twitchell, somewhat like a barbell, divided
up as pricey boutiques and huge department stores. At
one end are a few elite ''de luxe'' institutions with
internationally recognised brand names, who reign on
the basis of their exclusivity, much in the same way
as luxury designer wear. At the other end are a large
bulk of mass providers, who admit almost anyone and
everyone because they must keep expanding to survive.
The top group relies more on endowments and donations,
the bottom group on student fees and state support.
Meanwhile the middle category, the underfunded and undersubscribed
institutions that are neither good enough nor large
enough, is being destroyed.
Within the institutions of higher learning, the game
is not about getting through so much as just getting
in. The focus is all on attracting enrolment, and much
less on what goes on after that, so that both the good
and bad school are less concerned with the actual pedagogy,
the quality of the education and the capabilities of
their graduates than about their external image and
the related ability to attract more students. This explains
the famous statement attributed to Derek Bok, that Harvard
University (of which he was President for two decades)
is a real storehouse of knowledge, because '' so much
comes in, and so little goes out''.
Branding is all about telling a story, and the top schools
need to spread the story of how difficult they are to
enter. For this they have to show a high rejection rate,
which means in turn that they must somehow attract lots
of applicants. Since rank is based on selectivity, private
media rankings - most famously that of the US News and
World Report - assume great significance. Everyone in
this business loves to hate them and point out how inadequate
these rankings are, yet all the schools continue to
line up to provide the information that would allow
them to be ranked. Interestingly, the data used in the
rankings all relate to ''entry'' features rather than
''exit'' or ''output'' characteristics.
A lot of effort, not necessarily academic, goes into
sustaining the rankings and therefore the brands. ''Pioneer
advantage'' - the benefit of a long tradition - helps
but is not enough. Twitchell's brief description of
what is systematically done by Harvard to ensure that
it remains the top brand provides insights that could
be profitably utilised by all luxury marketers.
One might ask, this is all very well, but so what? Yes,
higher education, like so much else in our increasingly
consumerist societies, is being marketed and aggressively
advertised by competing institutions. But why should
this be considered an adverse development? Maybe this
is just one more instance of consumer sovereignty, allowing
students and their guardians to be fully aware of the
costs and advantages of different institutions.
Not really so, unfortunately, since the hype and the
ranking hide more than they reveal. More significantly,
this entire approach creates basic changes in the way
higher education is conceived and delivered, so that
the original purpose may be almost completely subsumed
or even swept away by the branding process. Twitchell's
comment on this deserves to be quoted in full:
''Understanding the marketing machinery operating Higher
Ed, Inc., ..may explain some recent developments at
universities such as (1) the predictable and supposedly
uncontrollable eruption of grade inflation and the concomitant
charade of teaching evaluations, (2) the single-minded
outsourcing of almost every conceivable aspect of Higher
Ed, Inc., (3) the selling off of academic space as the
campus become commercialised: Georgia Tech put McDonald's
golden arches on the floor of its coliseum, Columbia
University lent its name to a for-profit company offering
distance learning classes on the Internet, the University
of California accepted a research grant from a pharmaceutical
company to research new drugs and give the corporation
the right to get the first look at the results, etc.,
(4) the loss of any shared nationwide curriculum, (5)
the collapse of good schools at the low end of a cohort,
and, of course, (6) the impact of shopping for branded
education not just as a way to enter the institution
but as a method of choosing a course of study. What
looks like dumbing down is in reality a predictable
effect of competitive branding.'' (page 167)
Small wonder, then, that the close of this chapter contains
a series of quotations from serious higher educationists
worried about the implications of education as business.
Thus David Kirp of Berkeley: ''In barely a generation,
the familiar ethic of scholarship - baldly put, that
the central mission of universities is to advance and
transmit knowledge - has been largely ousted by the
just-in-time, immediate-gratification values of the
marketplace…The hoary call for a 'marketplace of ideas'
has turned into a double entendre, as the language of
excellence, borrowed from management gurus, dominates
the higher education 'industry'.'' (page 188)
Those of us outside the US cannot afford to smirk complacently
at this sorry state of American affairs, for in India
and elsewhere, we are looking at an image of our own
future.
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