Contemporary dynamics of student experience and belonging in higher education

Abstract

Higher education has changed rapidly over the past few decades where market forces and global competition have become defining characteristics of university sectors worldwide. Alongside the intensification of marketisation, the meanings around what it is to be a university student has also undergone change. In 2015, Critical Studies in Education published an article entitled ‘The neoliberal regime in English higher education: charters, consumers and the erosion of the public good’ by Rajani Naidoo and Joanna Williams that placed the English university students within the rapidly shifting neoliberalised higher education context and encouraged important debate in the field. This paper has now been cited over 200 times, reflecting its significant contribution to our scholarly understandings of the consumerist policy construction of university students. The authors skilfully demonstrate how the policy discourses in England produce and portray the student as a fee-paying consumer and further marginalise students with lower economic and cultural capital. Further, Naidoo and Williams (2015, p. 219) caution us that