ABSTRACT
Taking it as axiomatic that higher education is shaped by society, Chapter 2 —“Higher Education in a ‘Digital Age’: Capitalism, Neoliberalism and the University, Inc.”—presents a broad overview of the macro-societal structures currently reshaping higher education in North America. While current digital developments are accompanied by projections of and often pleas for revolutionary change in higher education, we do not believe that a technology-determined “digital age” is the fundamental cause of the contemporary transformation of higher education in the early 21st century. Our premise in this chapter is that to really understand what is happening to universities today, we must start with an understanding of capitalism and the State, not with new types of technology. The goal of this chapter, then, is to probe the relationships between capitalism, the neoliberal State and higher education in this so-called “digital age.” We unpack the general forces and relations of capitalism, using the example of Apple Inc. We focus on the politics of higher education and how neoliberal States influence the general policies and practices of universities and colleges, which are increasingly modelled on corporations. We also scrutinize the role that ideology (dominant systems of ideas and beliefs) may play in influencing how many people perceive higher education. By presenting a bird’s eye view of the society that higher education is shaped by, we disrupt the idea that higher education is being automatically transformed or “revolutionized” by recent developments in digital technology. Having painted the big picture of higher education in transformation, the remaining chapters focus on how the EdTech industry is contributing to and capitalizing on the disruption of higher education in pursuit of profit.
