Since the recent global paradigm shift in the governance of higher education toward business and marketing, internationally competitive education is increasingly considered as an asset for governments. Consequently, governments started to invest in education branding and marketing their educational systems. In Finland, national interest in…

Everyone seems to see higher education in crisis. In spite of recent fee increases, institutions are still underfunded if one takes into account present and future investment needs against current and projected surpluses. Students are having to pay more for their courses while being less certain of a graduate, or even any, job. Employers continue…

An exploration is presented of how urban spaces, polarized by class and ethnicity, structure the basic conditions of emerging local school markets. The authors investigate how the distribution of symbolic capital, or "hot knowledge" of the market, affects schools, the market, and the urban spaces themselves. The study is guided by…

Universities today inescapably find themselves part of nationally and globally competitive networks that appear firmly inflected by neoliberal concerns of rankings, benchmarking and productivity. This, of course, has in turn led to progressively anticipated and regulated forms of academic subjectivity that many fear are overly econo-centric in…

In this integrated review of literature, we address a powerful movement among interrelated organizations that we call the "ranking regime." We argue that the ostensive purpose of this regime is to identify "world class" universities, and thus to organize post-secondary education into a competitive transnational market. Although…