How do universities compete?

Abstract

Competition in higher education is ubiquitous. Universities worldwide compete for reputation, financial resources and talent in many different arenas (Krücken et al. 2021). They compete for world class (Shin and Kehm 2013), for public funding (Brewer et al. 2001; Fischer and Wigger 2016) third party funding, for students (Jongbloed 2004; Marginson 2006) doctoral students (Taylor and Cantwell 2013), as brands (Drori et al. 2014) in economic models (Fraja and Iossa 2002). They compete in rankings (Wedlin 2011; Espeland and Sauder 2016), for accreditation (Alajoutsijärvi et al. 2015) and so on. But competition takes not only place between organizations, nation states compete to have world class universities (Rust and Kim 2013) and individuals compete for reputation and jobs (Hamann 2019). While omnipresent in the discourse and analysis of higher education today the random list of competitions above also highlights that precisely this pervasiveness of the term makes it unclear. Higher education policies across countries have constructed universities and their subunits increasingly as competitive actors (Krücken 2017; Musselin 2018) but how this competition takes place is difficult to observe. How do we know that the political imperative of competition actually leads to a process of competition? How can we observe competition taking place? Competition thus generally comes with a backstory. In most cases it is connected to the assumption of higher education as markets. For example, by reframing degrees as “positional goods” and students as “consumers” in market terminology, higher education is transformed into a demand-supply curve for which competition is a logical consequence. On campus, in classes and in research work such curves are much more difficult to find. This applies likewise to the range of field theoretical approaches. In correspondence analyses of higher education institutions, field theory values distinct but common practices as resources and capital in order to assume a dynamic and competitive positionality among the units it projects. Thus to make competition work, an enormous amount of disciplinary and abstract imagination is necessary. It is considerably easier to derive competition from rankings, seals, competitive funding schemes or from newspaper articles. Third parties have become important as referees or distributors of scarce goods or status for which universities and their subunits compete (cf. Simmel [1908] 1992: 328; Werron 2015). The list, the color, the narrative over time allow for competitive changes. Yet, their retrospective and static assumption of competition should not be taken at face value. Rather it would be necessary to focus on interactions and negotiations between competitors and third parties to reconstruct competition in action. Another way to analyze competition is through self-descriptions (Kosmützky 2012; Taylor and Morphew 2010; Mitterle et al. 2018), expert interviews, or senate protocols (Mayer 2019). Through these, actors themselves can speak and act, highlighting that universities do see themselves as competing. Such written self-rationalizations are however fluid, fragmented, and difficult to scale. Given the centrality of the competition-imperative in higher education today, understanding how competition operates is central to grasping contemporary dynamics in higher education that increasingly lack a coercively defined hierarchy

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