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Global Crisis in Higher Education: Is Merit Being Trampled by Marketing and Money?

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Abstract

We have shown in the preceding chapter how a concerted ‘capture’ of the most important domains of education and educational thinking by neo-liberal economic perspectives since the 1950s has impelled eventually a momentous (global) shift towards narrowing the essence of education down to merely ‘learning’ of a bundle of productive and/or marketable skills through educational investment, with an overriding motive of reaping measurable pecuniary ‘gains’—both private and societal.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A recent study shows that the ‘League of European Research Universities’ or LERU are contributing almost €100 billion (US$117 billion) to the European economy and 1.3 million jobs’ (Myklebust and O’Malley 2017). Note that this contribution of universities is not reckoned with in terms of its role in the dissemination and generation of ‘knowledge’, but in terms of its role as any other industry in the economy in generating revenues or ‘value-added’ after the deduction of costs, and also in creation of employment.

  2. 2.

    In American high schools the vocational and academic education separated at the turn of the twentieth century (see Bodilly et al. 1993: v).

  3. 3.

    For a useful overview of the arguments both in favour and against privatisation of higher education, see Tilak (2004).

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Maharatna, A. (2019). Global Crisis in Higher Education: Is Merit Being Trampled by Marketing and Money?. In: The Indian Metamorphosis. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0797-3_5

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