Higher Education as Consumption

The news that Louis Vuitton stores in Hong Kong briefly ran out of stock as a result of mainland Chinese demand should remind us that not all parts of the world are mired in economic problems. Indeed the fortunes of luxury brands have continued to prosper because a consumer boom has held up so well in parts of the world where the economy seems to continue to grow inexorably. But consumption is not just a corollary of economic growth. It is a rich and variegated landscape of rights and obligations and it is no wonder that the academic literature on consumption has come on apace over the last 30 years, since the days when it was largely the preserve of economics and economic history (a good starting point is the recently published Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies).

Although higher education has been thought of as a consumer good, thoughts on what that might mean have tended to be the preserve of that serried band of professional commentators on higher education and various management consultants who garland (if that is the right word) the sector. There are exceptions, of course. One thinks of Hirsch’s classic book on positional goods, of various forays into the economics of higher education, of scattered tomes on the blurring of the distinction between various kinds of knowledge and what that portends. But there has been remarkably little connection with the mainstream of academic work on consumption. That is a pity.

Perhaps the paucity of thinking on the topic arises because many people instinctively shy away from thinking of higher education in this apparently economistic way but, equally, when you do, certain things become clearer. To begin with, it is quite possible that an observer could choose to consider certain kinds of higher education as a luxury good, with all that portends. And there is a large literature on the economic anthropology of luxury goods, full of insights.

Then, higher education is quite clearly caught up with what Avner Offer calls the challenge of affluence. If a sense of well-being has lagged behind affluence in many so-called developed countries, perhaps it is because higher education has not provided a compass with regard to the practices of choice that it should have as a key part of the social fabric.

Then, there is one other way of looking at consumption, a tradition which has been equally influential in the literature, and that is as a process of gifting. Yet the idea of higher education as a gift has not been well developed. This is surprising since I am sure that we can all think of people from our own experience who put so much time and effort into others’ development – far more than any job description could ever warrant – that the only way to think of this activity is as a kind of gift. Indeed, such a description calls up words like love and redemption, which are best analyzed in Danny Miller’s remarkable corpus of work, words which academics, for all kinds of obvious reasons, remain uneasy about using. Yet, they dwell at the heart of what is still called “vocation.”

In other words, what initially might look like an economistic way of proceeding could actually lead us towards new ways of thinking about higher education which might become part of the great recasting of the spirit and purpose of higher education which is now taking place.