ABSTRACT
In this perspective, many policies associated with a marketised higher education system undermine educational purposes. The tendency to see higher education as a good to be distributed through a market mechanism leads to attempts to provide more information to consumers and levelling out power differentials between buyers and sellers in the market. Marketisation is intended to inject dynamism into universities, to make them responsive to demanding customers, but Brown points out that this post-experience feature of higher education renders quality indicators problematic. State higher education policies are often justified in terms of instrumental value such as increasing productivity. Policies associated with marketisation of higher education transform a public institution into a largely private one. Roger Brown's identification of higher education as a post-experience good is in part a recognition that education, as a relational good, is highly differentiated between different individuals undergoing different experiences with different effects at different points over the course of a lifetime.
