ABSTRACT
With the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state in the late 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism was on the rise, and higher education was gradually transformed into a market, in which universities and colleges were supposed to compete for funding and student choice ought to determine the shape of the system. The Anderson Report argued in favour of grants in order to enable students to make choices between different universities without being confined by financial constraints. The market model as established under New Labour and the coalition government worked with a totally different understanding of choice. The changes of higher education that have taken place since the Thatcher government are often said to have led to a commodification of higher education. Though the sign value has been described as denoting the status of the commodity, its function eventually is to impart that status on the possessor of the commodity.
