Abstract
This chapter discusses the transformation of higher education with respect to universities’ attempt to compete for the best students. The imperative of mobilization and optimization within higher education begins even before enrolment on the course of study when universities engage in the expectation management of potential students. Our main thesis is that this expectation management is increasingly supplemented by quantification, which brings the possibility of predicting student success. Accordingly, the governmental subjectification of the ‘promising student’ is provided by data and is an omnipresent discourse for prospective students. In the first part of the chapter, we delineate how competitiveness has evolved in the area of teaching and study in the university. In the second section, we refer to study choice instruments that have become an important instrument in Germany to manage the expectations of prospective students. In the subsequent sections, we demonstrate the interrelation of competitiveness, datafication and subjectivity. However, we also reflect on the educational challenges that result from this interrelation and what it means for ‘study culture’ and higher education in general.
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Notes
- 1.
See also the chapter by Parreira do Amaral, Chap. 3, in this volume.
- 2.
Hell et al. have counted more than six hundred self-assessment tools in Germany (Hell et al., 2018, 133). There is a wide range of types and forms of OSAs. In recent years, there have been attempts to collect them on a single platform (see www.osa-portal.de; cf. Höft and Hell 2017). The wide range of tools is as confusing and diverse as the study programs: In 2019, there existed roughly 20,000 study programs in Germany (see HRK, 2019).
- 3.
See also Boyadijeva, in this volume.
- 4.
In this chapter we cannot provide a full discourse analysis of the collected text material. Our aim is to identify central motifs or aspects of the strategic relevance given to OSAs. The text material mostly stems from progress reports from universities as well as programmatic texts from university policy. Furthermore, it also contains how-to-instructions or manuals for the implementation of an OSA at a university (e.g. Weber et al., 2019) as well as critical self-reflections concerning the scientific standards of expertise and evaluation. We will not discuss the OSAs with respect to their quality or evidence. Existing empirical studies (see for instance Dietrich et al., 2019; Höft et al., 2019; Röder, 2017) show that many universities provide insufficient OSAs: Only 61% of the analyzed tests were evaluated adequately (Thiele and Kauffeld 2019b, 127).
- 5.
Simultaneously, the university can reduce the risk of investing resources without return (see Schröder et al., 2018).
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Thompson, C., Schröder, S., Wrana, D. (2022). Fostering the ‘Promising Student’ at the Outset. The Digitization and Management of Student Success in the Competitive University. In: Parreira do Amaral, M., Thompson, C. (eds) Geopolitical Transformations in Higher Education. Educational Governance Research, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94415-5_13
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