Accounting for higher education: Calculative practices in curricular administration

Abstract

Calculative practices resembling conventional accounting and sometimes termed ‘audit culture’ have materialised in higher education to account for learning and related activities. I posit these practices as curricular accounting, thus contributing an unrecognised but very real form of accounting to our discipline. Comparable with other accountings, the processes and practices this one comprises are potentially constituting the people, activities and organisations it involves (i.e., scholars and administrators, teaching and learning, disciplines and universities) as economic actors and entities, with the potential inadequacies and consequences that entails. Thus, my purpose is to increase and distribute knowledge and understanding about curricular accounting to students and academics, among others, to give them agency to allay the inadequacies it holds for them. The paper involves insider research: it reflects my observing and participating in the development and ubiquitous expansion of this accounting from within universities in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand. Framing the study historically and critically, I treat curricular accounting as a form of accounting, define and configure its aspects, explain its functioning and show that this is another accounting which never simply began. I find that its development connects with student growth, because of demand increasing for university-educated labour, wider access to universities becoming a social policy imperative, and knowledge, discipline-diversification and modularisation expanding. I also find that its recent development and current practice connect with neoliberalism and managerialism taking hold in government, public policy and higher education. Among the critical matters I raise are whether curricular accounting is serving to emancipate society; or whether it is enabling the business of higher education to fabricate products which consumers find compelling, resulting in exploitation of students and constraint of academics.