Lessons from a post-marketised higher education sector

The recent announcement of the English government to increase university tuition fees to £9,535 (US$12,300) in 2025 has left some vice-chancellors elated. The same could not be said of students, who haven’t welcomed the additional costs.

Though the increase of 3.1% isn’t comparable to the previous hikes in tuition fees faced by English university students since 1998, tuition fees and subsequent increases have recast higher education as a business, with students as consumers and university degrees as a market commodity to purchase.

The marketisation of higher education, in theory, empowers students, giving them the freedom to choose where they will pursue their post-secondary studies. This has caused higher education institutions to compete for student satisfaction and loyalty. In countries like England, where tuition fees jumped from £1,000 in 1998 to £9,535 in 2025, a consumer model in higher education has become more and more entrenched.

Yet this consumer orientation seems not solely tied to the payment of high tuition fees. In publicly funded higher education systems, the characteristics of market-oriented models, values and beliefs – in other words, the way of living – can lead students to adopt a customer mindset in which their studies are approached as a credential to access a better-paid job rather than a potentially transformational learning experience in an environment which hones their sense of citizenship.

Indeed, some have observed that seeing higher education as a business – offering a service to student-consumers – has become a commonly accepted reality making it almost impossible to imagine a tuition-free system.

So what happens when a country decides to reverse this market-driven approach to higher education? How are students understood if they are no longer characterised as the paying consumers of higher education ‘services’?

Media portrayals

In 2016, after nearly 40 years of market-driven policies in what was once considered one of the most marketised systems in the world, the Chilean government introduced Gratuidad (free education in Spanish), abolishing tuition fees for most underprivileged students. This followed a wave of student activism and public pressure which aimed to dismantle a key market mechanism within higher education.

In a recent study of Chilean newspapers, we examined how Chilean media – which is highly concentrated and embedded in a long-standing neoliberal society – depicts students post-Gratuidad. Our research revealed three dominant representations of students, each of them suggesting a negative portrayal.

The first pictures students as egocentric. Articles shape an image of students behaving like children solely driven by a desire to pay as little as possible for their own higher education, minimising the stated pledges of students that identify equitable access and education as a universal social right.

The words in some of the articles prompt the reader to view the students’ demands as excessive and unreasonable, even trivial. Furthermore, some language used in the media casts the student protests as morally or socially unacceptable.

Here the representation of the student as egocentric includes stereotypes of students as violent, emphasising overt aggression and violence, to the point of evoking fear in the reader.

Discrimination

A second image is one of students as victims of discrimination. When Gratuidad was first approved and excluded all students at private universities, some media coverage implicitly cast students as vulnerable and suffering from segregation as a result.

Private students were portrayed as unjustly neglected to bolster the argument that private higher education students were also in need of public financial support. In sum, newspapers portrayed students as victims of a policy that did not go far enough, highlighting the exclusion of students from private institutions.

Lastly, while marketisation promises to amplify student voices and prioritise their choices, our media analysis tells a different story. Students are instead presented as marionettes doing the bidding of socialists and controlled by external forces.

In effect, when students critique marketisation, they’re often dismissed as self-serving or portrayed as vulnerable, child-like figures. Instead of being acknowledged as political actors or activists, they are portrayed as weak or violent, reinforcing the dominance of economic rationalism.

Such representations echo the way the 2011 Chilean student movement was reported in the Chilean press, where influential newspapers backed the market-oriented higher education system and resisted any change.

A critical lens

A recent call from University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell for free higher education in Australia echoes Chile’s reforms. Maskell argues that viewing university education as a private benefit rather than a public good is misguided. Yet, our analysis shows how Chilean media portrayals post-tuition fee removal delegitimise calls for free education.

The negative representations of students that we identify serve to restrict alternative representations and may limit public support for policies like Gratuidad. While the media narratives we analysed presented students in a negative light, these views are not universally shared by the Chilean public or students themselves.

Chile’s experience is not just a local story. It offers valuable insights into the broader global trend of balancing market forces with public good. Countries like South Africa, New Zealand and Colombia have followed Chile with similar policies, though their long-term impacts remain to be seen.

As England prepares to put up tuition fees, Chile’s transition offers valuable insights into achieving access, affordability and justice in education. The Chilean higher education system’s journey from fully state-funded, to the most privatised, and back to significant government involvement highlights the complex interplay of market forces and public good.

Chile’s journey offers a critical lens through which to view the future of higher education globally. As countries such as England grapple with the balance between market forces and public good, Chile’s bold move towards free education provides a blueprint for challenging the status quo and imagining a more equitable educational landscape.

Dr Patricio Sanchez-Campos is an assistant professor in marketing at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and holds a PhD from the business school. As a qualitative researcher, his interests are in the field of consumer behaviour, consumer vulnerabilities and markets in higher education. He is particularly interested in exploring how marketing practices and market-oriented policies produce, reproduce or resist social power relations, ideologies, social (in)justice and social (ex)inclusion for less privileged people. He has a particular interest in discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis as analytical frameworks to understand the influence of language on society.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.