ABSTRACT
In this chapter we focus on students’ experiences of choice within HE, particularly noting the consequences and contradictions of consumerist choice-making for educational environments. The assumption that ‘choice is good’ is largely unquestioned in our consumer society. It is indeed at the heart of a system that is assumed to ensure quality, diversity and individual freedom. Furthermore, since traditional sources of identity are ‘lost’ in contemporary society, it is often through the choices we make in the marketplace that we now come to understand who we are. We must each now create a story of self, ‘amid a puzzling diversity of options and possibilities’ (Giddens 1991: 3). The marketplace has become both the prime provider of a multiplicity of choice, and therefore also a key location for a solution to the requirement that we ‘choose who we are’.
