Marketers should oversee the student experience to graduation and beyond

Students should not be treated as 'customers' and research/ teaching should not be 'branded'. Both have had a poisonous influence on universities, undermining science and pedagogy and replacing them with popularity and profit.

Universities ought to be budget-autonomous government agencies with democratic self-governance, like in other countries. Have you have thought of brand marketing for government agencies? Didn't think so. The root problem is that the customers don't know what is good for them and would prefer to have less work in getting their degrees. This doesn't work because it is usually the lecturers who know better what the customers should learn and how. By asking for tuition fees, this is turned on its head and *has* to lead to a race to the bottom in standards, by design. This is a form of market failure, and even economists agree that either government regulation or self-government of institutions or a combination of these can overcome such failures. Why are we not moving into this direction? It's bad for students because they learn less and pile on debt. It's bad for the government and ultimately the tax payer because most debts are eventually paid off by the government because the former students never make it into those income regions where they could start paying off the loans. It's not even a popular thing on the basis of which the vote share could be increased. And it is also bad for lecturers and staff who have been suffering from its effects immensely. We need to move away from this unsustainable model and overcome this market failure *now* - instead of even adding more marketing activities as suggested here. Dear government, please do something about it. Please realise that the short-term economic gains of treating higher education as an internationally marketable commodity are worth less than the economic prospects of educating millions of Britons at a high level in the long term. Your party will govern Britain for the foreseeable future anyway, so you should not be constrained by short-term goals.

I do not know where to start with this article full of jargon, platituted and buzzwords. I am a marketing academic myself (mea culpa) but I despair of such hollow and unthinking gibberish. I am not against the branding concept per se (this where I beg to differ from the other commenters). However, it is a more nuanced and complex vehicle than the author makes it out to be. She does not seem to have ever heard of stakeholder marketing or corporate makreting, corporate branding and identity management etc. but applies simplified consumer marketing and product branding templates uncritically to a university (or any other organisation for that matter). No wonder our subject area and profession has such a bad name amongst our academic (and non-academic) peers.

*an edit function to correct spelling errors would be great!