"I can't get no satisfaction":measuring student satisfaction in the age of a consumerist higher education

Abstract

One could be excused for failing to recognise today’s universities as the inheritors of the global higher education system that arose more than 70 years ago from the ashes of the Second World War. A wave of post-war optimism ushered in a global movement with a utopian vision in which arbitrary divisions such as class, gender and race would be transcended in the pursuit of academic enlightenment (Scott, 1995). Universities were to be one of the key drivers of this change. But, contemporary academia is a distinctly different beast. The enlightenment values of the liberal education model, once the dominant philosophy in universities across the world, are gradually being supplanted by a consumerist ideology (Furedi, 2011): Yesterday’s ‘Cathedrals of learning’ are being replaced by today’s ‘Supermarkets of facts’.