ABSTRACT
Encouraging prospective students to make ‘better’ decisions about higher education has been a concern of the government in England since at least the early 2000s, but it has gathered pace with the increasing marketisation of the sector. There is a barely voiced assumption that students are poor consumers within the marketplace and that this needs policy intervention. In particular, there is often considered to be a problem with high achievers not selecting elite universities (Sutton Trust, 2004). Meanwhile, political, academic and journalistic assessments have been repeatedly confounded in their attempts to predict student behaviour. This is, in part, due to the simplistic application of economics to a complex social field, where, for example financial (dis)incentives have proved largely ineffective at influencing demand, despite students’ assumed sensitivity around the cost of higher education.
