3. Global Higher Education Industry

including Ernst and Young, McKinsey and Company, KPMG and Deloitte have all produced blueprint proposals for the future of universities that emphasise the potentially transformative effects of digital technologies and data use.30 Digital and data-intensive smart universities, it has been claimed, are ‘institutions that can use the huge amounts of data they generate to improve the student learning experience, enhance the research enterprise, support effective community outreach, and advance the campus’s infrastructure’ (Lane and Finsel, 2014, p. 4). However, these ideals of the digital university favoured by policymakers and policy influencers also emphasise neoliberal logics of economics, efficiency, competition, audit, accounting, performance measurement, quality management, marketisation, commercialisation and privatisation (Selwyn, 2014). Processes of marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation of HE mean universities are increasingly focused on achieving market value through competition, performance ranking, consumer demand, and return on investment (Busch, 2016). Data and metrics such as performance rankings and accountability ratings have become driving ‘engines’ of HE, exerting powerful effects on how universities are evaluated and incentivising institutions to ensure they perform to meet the metrics (Espeland and Sauder, 2016). Universities have been encouraged to advance their use of digital infrastructures and platforms, particularly by ‘unbundling’ their services into component parts and exposing them to market forces for ‘rebundling’ by outsourced commercial companies as new digital products (McCowan, 2017).

As part of this shift to digital and data-intensive universities, a ‘Global HE Industry’ has expanded and mutated to include a range of digital providers and data services vendors (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2017). The Global HE Industry includes a vast array of businesses, consultancies, think tanks, investors and other private actors and commercial organisations, which together function to open up tertiary education to market processes. Combined, the Global HE Industry and processes of marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation underpin the

30 Ernst and Young. 2018. Can the universities of today lead learning for tomorrow? The University of the Future. EY: https:// www.ey.com/en_au/government-public-sector/can-the-universities-of-today-lead-learning-for-tomorrow; McKinsey and Company. 2018. How higher-education institutions can transform themselves using advanced analytics. McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/how-higher-education-institutions-cantransform-themselves-using-advanced-analytics; Deloitte. 2018. The impact of predictive analytics in higher education. Deloitte: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/ public-sector/articles/five-principles-for-improving-student-outcomes.html; KPMG. 2019. Future-proofing the university. KPMG: https://home.kpmg/uk/en/home/insights/2019/02/future-proofing-theuniversity.html