ABSTRACT
Marketisation in higher education has become a widespread phenomenon across the world. Driven by neo-liberalism, and the strengthening of global capitalism, marketisation has influenced higher education sectors across the world to adopt business and profit-motivated strategies. In the process, the language and practices of business have become endemic in higher education sectors. This development has proceeded amidst much criticism related mainly to resistance towards what many refer to as the commercialisation or commoditisation of education, the erosion of traditional values of education and the ascendancy and dominance of consumerism in the sectors. In this environment, students have become consumers or clients, and the practices of education have been turned into transactional exchanges based on the principles of payment for services rendered. In the Global South, criticisms of the marketisation of higher education have tended to focus on the widening of inequalities in education, the unidirectional mobility of intellectual capital to the higher education sectors of the Global North and the further erosion of quality. The chapter calls for marketisation which seeks to mitigate these effects in higher education sectors of the Global South. With the increasing pace of decolonisation the chapter notes the potential this has to increase and widen inequalities between higher education sectors of the global North and South and identifies ways in which global imperatives could speak to the imperatives of decolonisation in new marketisation arrangements.
