The Commodification of Education

Whilst a commodity is something that satisfies a human need, under capitalism, a commodity is something created for sale and not for one’s own use. Commodification means turning something (in the case of this article, education) into a market-driven product or service — something that is bought, sold, and consumed rather than a public good or right.

In a planned economy under socialism, commodity production would be organised around the satisfaction of the needs of the people: homes, energy, nutritious food, healthcare, education, culture, recreation and so on. Under capitalism, the capitalists do not care if the population have the necessities of life, each capitalist plans his own production with a single objective– profit!

Since the 1970s we have seen a steady degradation of the necessities of our lives. The privatisation of energy, transport, housing, health and education to name but a few have made us worse off whilst the fat cat capitalists continue to amass more profit, more capital!

It happens over time, it starts off slowly, imperceptibly and indiscriminately so we don’t notice, we don’t make a fuss, it sounds reasonable, we don’t kick off. But it doesn’t stop, and it will continue until we are penniless, beleaguered and have nothing left except an awareness of the reality that has always existed – it is us or them.

The Commodification of Education

“Young people have told the BBC they are finding it harder than ever to get a job, with some graduates frustrated at being turned down for roles at supermarkets. The government says getting more young people into work is a priority …” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2307p4jjz4o)

So began a BBC news article on April 29, 2025. Perhaps the two journalists it took to write the piece did not look back in the BBC archives because it’s not a new problem. Way back in 2003 the BBC ran a feature titled, Graduates Facing a Tougher Job Market (BBC News) highlightingfirsthand accounts from graduates expressing frustration over the competitive job landscape and the mismatch between their qualifications and available opportunities.

The same again in 2010 when the BBC suggested UK graduate unemployment had risen to its highest level since 1999 (BBC+1BBC News+1). And again in 2016 when it reported a downturn in job opportunities exacerbated by economic uncertainties and shifts in employer recruitment strategies. (BBC+1BBC News+1BBC News) In 2020 its headline screamed.” The Class of 2020’s Uncertain Future”.

For 20 years plus the BBC has highlighted a shortfall in graduate employment yet rather than question why generations of young people continue to be indebted for life to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds without hope or opportunity for employment security, they offer up a litany of trite tips such as searching for work beyond a 40-mile radius of where you live or working for free to boost your CV. Are they kidding! Does the capitalist class they represent think we are so senseless that they can continue these shenanigans indefinitely? 

In this article we will illustrate how our education system has undergone the process of commodification, and how it was done, in front of our eyes, sometimes with us yelling jubilantly (gullibly) from the sidelines at our own impending misfortune. Remember the effusive and positive response to Tony Blair’s 1996 quote, “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, and education.”

This slogan became the defining mantra of his first general election campaign in 1997, signalling New Labour’s focus on reforming and expanding education as a cornerstone of its domestic agenda. While it evoked an image of progressive investment in our potential, the actual policy aligned with a report commissioned by the previous Tory government under John Major, the Dearing Report, revealing a shift toward neoliberal restructuring.

Blair’s government embraced Dearing’s recommendations, especially the introduction of tuition fees and a shift toward cost-sharing in higher education. So while “education, education, education” sounded like a public investment promise, it coincided with the erosion of universal, free access and the onset of education’s commodification characterised by students becoming customers, degrees becoming products and universities behaving like businesses, competing for revenue, rankings, and brand value.

Right in front of our eyes

Following the release of Dearing’s report in 1997, Blair introduced an annual tuition fee of £1,000 framing it as necessary to fund expansion. What it marked was the end of fully state-funded higher education. Student maintenance grants were abolished in favour of loans thus shifting the education burden to individuals. Blair’s approach followed Dearing’s neoliberal logic that education is an economic investment, not a right. Blair’s use of “education” functioned ideologically by turning a public demand into a capitalist agenda converting education into a commodity and producing a docile indebted labour force whilst we all stood ideally by and watched.

Over the next three decades after being sucked into the idea that £1000 was a small and acceptable investment in tertiary education for all, we completely capitulated and bought into the premise that a future for our children meant university education and that came with massive debt despite an ongoing uncertain future. Here’s how it all unfolded …

1997 – Dearing Report

• Tuition fees introduced: £1,000 per year.
• Grants gradually replaced by loans.
• Establishes higher education as a private investment in human capital.

2004 – Higher Education Act

• Tuition fees trebled to £3,000/year.
• Variable fees introduced (differentiated pricing).
• Groundwork laid for the student-as-a-consumer model.

2010 – Browne Review (Cameron–Clegg Coalition)

• Full marketisation proposed: remove tuition cap, allow market pricing.
• Government raises fees to £9,000/year (implemented in 2012).
• Massive cuts to state funding; universities now rely heavily on student debt.

2017 – Higher Education and Research Act

• Created Office for Students (OfS) as a regulator with business-like oversight.
• Allowed new private providers easier entry to award degrees.
• Introduced TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework): ranks universities using market metrics (graduate salary, satisfaction, etc.).

2020s – Full Maturity of the Market Model

• Students carry over £200 billion in debt collectively.
• Surge in corporate sponsorships, consultancy, IP commercialisation.
• Universities increasingly run like corporations: branding, market segmentation, investment portfolios.
• Rising use of casualised academic labour, reflecting gig economy conditions.

In the space of three decades, whilst we all watched from the sidelines, education has shifted from a public service meant to develop our children and affording them the opportunity of a brighter future, to a personal investment to compete in a precarious job market the only guarantee of which is massive indebtedness. The neoliberal university model is working exactly as capital required; it extracts value, reproduces inequality and fragments resistance.

Winners and losers

The commodification of education has created a web of direct financial beneficiaries none of whom belong to the working class. The number of UK graduates has increased from circa 50,000 annually in the 1970s to more than 500,000 a year today, so who has directly benefited from this growth in opportunity?

 The winners:

Private education companies and publishers including textbook publishers, testing companies, and ad education tech firms who all profit from the selling of textbooks, learning platforms and assessment tools; the licensing of digital content and learning management systems, and the administering of exams and qualifications (SATs, A-levels, IELTS, etc.) To cite one specific example, Pearson, a major UK-based education company, had revenues of over £3.8 billion in 2023 — primarily from selling educational services globally. In 1997, Pearson reported an operating profit of £328 million, and in

2023 the company achieved an adjusted operating profit of £573 million, representing a 75% increase in operating profit over the 26-year period. And that’s just one of the winners of our indebtedness.

Then we have the student loan providers and financial Institutions who transformed student loans into high yield financial products and sold them off to investors in tranches. In the US, student debt is a $1.7+ trillion industry, with major banks and loan servicers profiting from fees and interest whilst here in the UK, student loan assets were sold to private investors for £1.7 billion in 2017 and again in 2018, profiting financial firms while indebting our children!

And let’s not forget the university management and private contractors who, because of the shift to a market-based model have seen vice chancellors and senior management salaries skyrocket to between £200,000–£500,000. And of course let’s not forget the private companies running accommodation, catering, and campus services, university-affiliated real estate developers profiting from student housing projects, and private landlords who benefit from charging exorbitant rents to students.

Then there are the usual hangers-on such as large consultancies (e.g., PwC, Deloitte, McKinsey) who are paid to ‘reform’ education systems, and quality assurance and accreditation agencies who all help drive market logic into education, extracting public funds as ‘expertise’.

The losers

We appreciate it doesn’t need spelling out but for the sake of completeness, we will. The losers are the ever-growing young proletarian or working-class kids, who, far from being raised to a higher level of economic prosperity, are now deeply indebted, underemployed, repressed, depressed and feel hopeless. They are joined by the once self-aggrandised labour aristocrat lecturers whose conditions have worsened with short-term contracts, constraining performance metrics, and an admin bloat, and our working-class communities, who thought they were getting education as a tool for their liberation but were administered another dose of deprivation and exclusion.

Class consciousness is our salvation

The commodification of education has turned a public good into a site of capital accumulationjust like it has done with every other public service and institution that was previously controlled directly by the state.  It doesn’t matter who is in government, it is the capitalist class who run the system, and they run it to look after their own class interests. Until we recognise this fact and decide to do something about it, extraction of what little we have left will continue and our children, and their children’s lives will spiral further into misery.

In the case of education, what was once a tool for enlightenment and social progress is now a debt-producing industry, a sorting mechanism for labour markets, and another way for capital to extract value from the working class.

Education, like everything under capitalism, becomes a commodity — not a means to enlighten the masses, but to reproduce and maintain the current class system and relations of production.

This article may have focused on education but only to illustrate how the degradation of the quality of our lives is planned, implemented and continued by successive governments and in accordance with the laws of capital. The commodification of our lives, of us, will continue unabated until we stop it.

We are the working class, and it is within our power to do exactly that!