Branded education

As higher education in the U.S. gets commercialised, outsourced and franchised, what is being delivered is no longer knowledge so much as a brand.

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 such systems in any country. In India, 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 U.S.

Branded Nation: The marketing of Megachurch, College, Inc., and Museumworld by James B. Twitchell (Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2004) is 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 out 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 expose of the business of higher education in the U.S.

Given the demographic changes, higher education in the U.S. should be going through a period of contraction if earlier ratios of enrolment had been maintained. In order 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 this 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 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 of knowledge is no longer the professor, but the professional manager. And the largest department in most universities is now the "development" department, concerned with raising and managing 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 under-funded and under-subscribed institutions, which are neither good enough nor large enough, is being destroyed.

Within the institutions of higher learning, the game is not so much about getting through as about just getting in. The focus is all on attracting enrolment, and much less on what goes on after that, so that both good and bad schools are less concerned about the actual pedagogy, the quality of 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 it is to enter them. For this, they have to show a high rejection rate, which means in turn that they must somehow attract a large number of applicants. Since rank is based on selectivity, private media rankings - most famously that of 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 used by all luxury marketers.

One might ask: `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 becomes 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 U.S. 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.