David against Goliath? Media representations of a policy of tuition fee removal in a highly marketised society
- Dr Patricio Sanchez-Campos, Nottingham University Business School (Marketing Department) UK
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The application of tuition fees in marketised higher education (HE) has altered the perception of HE from a public good to that of a privately paid commodity. However, the funding of HE and its impact remain topics of substantial debate. In this article, we examine how a public policy aimed at removing tuition fees for economically disadvantage students (Gratuidad in Spanish) is discursively represented in written media. The context is the Chilean HE system, deeply rooted in a neoliberal society. Drawing upon Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of media commentary, our findings reveal in the early stages of the reform hegemonic neoliberal discourses attempting to uphold the social order. A robust rejection of the reform is evidenced by discursively positioning Gratuidad as a faulty, ill-thought-out and mistrusted policy, portrayed as an obstacle to the pursuit of more equality. Later, once the reform was extended and more inclusive, our analysis uncovers notions of change. Discourses promoting collectivism, resisting market values, and challenging the individualistic view of HE as a commoditised entity, lead us to conceptualise Gratuidad as a social revolution promising a better future of Chilean society. Our scholarly contribution features media representations of a policy strongly opposing to a government funded HE in such neoliberal society. However, the empirical analysis also indicates that policy initiatives aimed at restricting market-driven ideologies in HE, a rather unorthodox approach in highly market-oriented contexts, may be interpreted as a countermovement to disembedded markets that perpetuates the neoliberal dogma within HE.
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Patricio is a qualitative researcher with an interest in the field of consumer behaviour, consumer vulnerabilities, and markets in HE. He is interested in exploring how marketing practices and market-oriented policies produce, reproduce, or resist social power relations, ideologies, social (in)justice, and social (ex)inclusion for less privileged consumers. His doctoral research focused on students’ representations in HE exploring alternatives to the student-as-a-consumer orientation, this in the context of Chilean new tuition-free HE. He follows Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis approach. He is a Fellow of the HEA and has more than 20 years of experience teaching and leadership in HE.
