How to resist the enshittification of higher education

You’ll have heard of enshittification – the American Dialect Society chose it as its 2023 word of the year.

Canadian-British blogger Cory Doctorow (journalist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing) coined the term in 2022.

It refers to the idea that new (mainly online) platforms offer useful products and services at a loss as a way to gain new users.

Spotify used to be great. It played music in a reliable and unobtrusive way – at a cost that was significantly less than getting the bus into town for bands’ new CDs.

Then, when users are locked in, platforms offer access to the users to suppliers at a loss. Google scooped up so many advertisers at preferable rates that to “Bing” something was seen as stupid.

And once suppliers and users are locked in, platforms shift their surpluses to shareholders – and users and suppliers suffer, because the incentive to improve or maintain quality is gone.

It’s like those Bus Companies that already have the termly ticket sold to students. It might look like a killer deal, but it drives competition out – and once the money’s in the bank, when 10 drivers call in sick, it’s the per-journey routes that get rostered first.

Hence Spotify rolling out an AI DJ feature that record companies can engage in payola to be featured in, and plans to TikTokify its interface in the form of a vertically-scrolling video “discovery feed” – all to generate more eyeball time and more money.

Enshittified platforms can be both a monopoly for users and a monopsony for suppliers – because high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives exist.

And you don’t even notice when Spotify or Facebook or Google or whatever decline – because it happens via “twiddling”.

A “continual adjustment of the parameters of the system” takes place – all in search of marginal improvements to finances.

On first glance, enshittification appears to have nothing to do with higher education. Universities are not web platforms or apps, and students are not subscribers. Or are they?

VCs and big money

If we think of the period of massification of higher education in England since £9,000 fees, we might reason that the subsidy involved – intended to be around £4,500 per student – is not dissimilar to the venture capital funding that accompanies the launch of a new platform.

It might have been presented as the maintenance of public investment at the time, but over time it has morphed into a drain on the taxpayer generated by “low-value degrees” supplied by “low-value” universities – and so via student terms changes, the state has been determined to reduce that subsidy.

The VC money – venture capital, not vice chancellor – has been drying up, not least because the costs of offering it have to be booked to the national accounts in a way that George Osbourne never did.

And while the government has conspired to make the long-term subscription cost longer and longer by moving the cancellation date from 30 to 40 years hence, there’s now not much left in transferring the cost onto those in their fifties. Now it has to just cost less.

Hence the user experience enjoyed at the start of that era has deteriorated slowly, and in many ways, imperceptibly:

• The sector has maintained a panoply of conceptual measures to convince students that they are lucky to be there. We’re positive when we get lucky.
• Students are in larger class sizes, getting less support each – and the signalling effect of higher education is having less of an impact on salary.
• They’re having to share facilities and resources that at first expanded, but in recent years have failed to keep pace with expansion – as the sector moved into markets even more conceptually grateful and even less likely to complain.
• They’re getting less choice. The core modules are still there – with bigger and bigger class sizes – but the optionals and electives are under the same pressure that genuinely new music is on Spotify.
• Getting support is becoming impossible. Chatbots and self-service options get deployed to cover the fact that students get fewer replies, less often, to their emails from busy academic staff. Endless policy reviews in the area ignore the growth of the staff-student ratio.
• Students are also enjoying a less and less positive wider experience. Our student finance system, which hasn’t improved with inflation and hates pausing and setbacks, coupled with the rising costs of everything from food to rent to books to a night out leaves students increasingly distressed, miserable and fearful for their future.
• Students get tweaks they didn’t ask for, or at least never prioritised. Plenty of enshittification is spun as directly addressing student feedback – like shorter terms to “ensure proper breaks”, less assessment to reduce the “burden” and more (online) lectures for “more contact hours”.
• And its suppliers – staff – are locked in. If you have a PhD in whatever, it’s not as if it’s easy to envisage doing something other than the teaching and research you’ve made a career out of. That lock-in breeds worsening terms and conditions – both above the surface in terms of pay and pensions, and below it in terms of workload.
• Subscriber growth – student numbers by another name – becomes the only show in town for the selectors. For everyone else, market share is used to decide the fate of whole departments. And to keep recruiting, universities remain in a marketing mode designed to make it all look fine – causing students to internalise the failings when it doesn’t match up the realities.

As the VC money drains away in the name of “the sustainability of the system”, the growing high-tariff platforms pack more students on (in) and the low-tariff players cut costs (and the experience) to survive. And in the process, everyone suffers.

Countervailing forces

In his writing, Doctorow identifies two principles, countervailing forces that can prevent (or at least slow) the enshittification process – end-to-end, and the right of exit.

The end-to-end principle is the idea that users get given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present. On social media, that would entail users getting to see content from users they subscribed to, allowing creators to reach their audience without going through an opaque algorithm. On search engines, it means matches for search queries shown before sponsored results rather than afterwards.

In higher education, it means the programme and wider experience as advertised, rather than the state it ends up in once delivered. It means the optional elective choice of modules as sold in its breadth; it means the “supportive environment” translating into prompt emails from academics; it means the cost of food or fitness on campus being affordable rather than being widely regarded as the rip-off equivalent of buying a hold bag on a Ryanair flight.

It’s about applying the principle of consumer protection law – no student has the right to a first, but they do have the right to the side of the educational partnership that was promised. But the woeful efforts to apply that principle by regulators and ministers (who are themselves heavily invested in and encouraging of efforts aimed at reducing the subsidy), coupled with the supplier staff viewing the word as ideological catnip, means the principle gets fatally eroded.

The second is the right of exit, where the users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. On social media or with your smart speakers, that requires interoperability, countering the network effects that “lock in” users and prevent competition between platforms.

But it’s spectacularly hard to switch providers in UK HE, and even the regulator charged with making it more possible lost interest almost as soon as it could get away with. Nobody locks in its users to a walled garden like Apple, and no system is better at locking in students once enrolled than UK HE – hence our spectacularly high levels of post-programme regret.

Despite the allegations that universities are “big businesses” that only care about the recruitment of new students, few of their leaders think of themselves in that way. That’s because most are still charities and there are no large shareholders pocketing the cash – at least as long as they blind-eye those in the ed-tech market or the student housing market.

But in reality, if you’ve gone from teaching undergraduates on £9,000 to less than £6,000 in real terms because the subsidy is being removed, the same process applies. If the more value a company permits its employees and users to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders, then if the shareholders reduce their subsidy, the less value its users and employees can carve off. By definition.

Universities need discipline

Doctorow reckons that there’s four forces that discipline organisations, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:

Competition: Organisations that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices. But as we note above, switching is nigh-on impossible – and buying is framed as “winning” a “place”

Regulation: Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less. If there’s a university in the country that thinks that the impact of fines by the Office for Students (OfS) or the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for mis-selling is higher than the impact of strict compliance when the subsidy is being cut, I’ll eat everyone’s hat.

Self-help: The theory here goes that computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them. Hence while a company can make its ads 20 per cent more invasive to net 2 per cent more revenue per user, a savvy user can disenshittify by installing ad-block software. The more that students cheat on their assignments, the more that the qualifications being sold as signifiers of their ability are undermined.

Workers: And then there’s the staff. A historical “talent shortage” in the tech sector meant that workers used to enjoy a lot of leverage – which is why mottoes like Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered – they instilled a sense of mission.

Hence while tech workers had lots of bargaining power, they tended not to flex it when their boss demanded they sacrifice their health, families or sleep. But there’s a deep and dark downside to the exploitation that that entails – being asked to enshittify the things that they ruined their health to produce, workers experience a sense of moral injury, and respond with outrage. And because tech workers saw themselves as founders and entrepreneurs in waiting – heroic figures to be – there was an endless supply of others waiting in the wings.

See also academics.

So what can be done? Doctorow figures that reversing enshittification comes down to restoring and strengthening each of the constrains that have melted away. And thinking about how doing so might apply to higher education becomes a fun thought experiment to try.

Unenshittifying higher education

Competition at the selection stage has become a zero-sum game – all it does, over time, is suck funding away from other activity, and because regulation is so poor, actually distorts choices by painting pictures that can’t be real.

Competition during the experience is a whole other thing. If we sat down and designed a funding, housing and student support system that supported students to be able to mix and switch providers and modules, even a small percentage of students availing themselves of the ability to do so would have a profound impact.

Regulation isn’t that hard. Regulating quality via metrics isn’t evil, it’s just not quick or granular enough, or able to filter out the noise of the inputs. If anything, the sector’s big mistake has been to let go of the other ways in which crap can be called out – leaving OfS’ inspection reports now the only show in town if you want to spot a cohort of students being mugged off. QAA needs to step up, and step in.

Meanwhile regulating the promises that universities make such that students can get easy access to compensation if they’re not met would be quite straightforward – tell them their rights, and make it a doddle to enforce them. Again, even a small percentage of students availing themselves of the ability to do so would have a profound impact.

Self-help is interesting, because the solution goes to the heart of the academic endeavour. Doctorow’s view is that Stein’s Law will take hold – anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. But my guess on this one is that higher education’s failure to find an alternative to the assessment of a digital asset as a symbol of a student’s learning amid a torrent of AI investment making it possible to fake it will be its biggest problem before we know it.

HE is only partly a consumer business on the basis that while you can buy a place, you can’t buy a first. But increasingly, you can. And without authentic assessment, it’s that that will destroy its value.

And then there’s labour. It will only represent a constraint if its labour is withdrawn in the face of the promises-kept thing above – and only then if it starts to be withdrawn over workload. If a personal tutor could do it in 2014 on a cohort of 20, but now struggles on a cohort of 120 when the expectations around it are higher, it’s that that has to manifest in labour disputes.

The answer isn’t for staff to be allowed to fail students who need the support while escaping compulsory redundancy, bolstered by early-carrerers with dreams and PhD students will bills to pay. UCU has flirted here in recent years – but really should go much further.

Put another way, the sector – in the form of its staff, its students, its managers and its governors – can prevent the enshittification of higher education if they want to. But doing so would involve all of its players conspiring to make it impossible for the shareholders in government to continue to reduce the subsidy.

When, in Autumn 2020, there was a real prospect of the system not delivering the places required by the parents and applicants that wanted them, ministers briefly panicked – but then everyone involved just conspired to degrade the experience for the same price. The signal it sent was yes – as students, as staff, as managers and as governors, we’ll play along. And look what happened next.

Signals like that need to stop. The platform needs to suffer an outage.