Barbarians at the Gates? Private Security Providers for Higher Education Admissions

Before 1998 higher education institutions in Germany had barely any rights to pick the students they preferred. Students were enrolled based on capacity calculations and their highest secondary degree grade – the Abitur. Since then, organizational and study reforms have increased the decision rights of universities in admissions (Bloch et al. 2015). In order to sort their applicants universities can build up material border spaces that test anything course related from internationality to an applicant’s ability. While criteria and prerequisites are highly diverse, an increasing number of universities make their decision based on standardized test schemes by private providers. Most notably the IELTS and TOEFL-tests for English language capacities and ability tests such as the General Management Abilities Test (GMAT). Private universities have been the promotors of such externalized testing but public universities have followed. Building on ethnography and interviews in private and public higher education institutions the paper will argue that in order to “catch the barbarians before they materialize” (Longo 2018: 2) universities increasingly construct a borderland that is co-patrolled by private providers. Private providers build up highly formalized spaces to which access is monitored (hand vain scanners; ID-controls) and in which applicants are graded to structure the sorting processes of universities. Privatization here builds on a complicated process that first assumes universities as autonomous organizations (1). It transforms membership boundaries into organizational borders over which universities increasingly obtain control (2). In order to increase the legitimacy of such admission borders, universities integrate third parties that formalize the testing of applicant abilities (3). This process has started in private higher education institutions but increasingly moved into the public sector.