Abstract
The political goal to decrease public expenditure by way of private debt and its distribution through markets is a central characteristic of austerity governance in Anglo-America. But in England, a similar, but less heralded government backed debt solution, had been introduced as part of the marketisation reforms within the Higher Education (HE) sector. The Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) loan is a complex funding solution implemented to shield student borrowers from risk of default by shifting non repayment onto the taxpayer. While responsible for entangling students, universities, and the taxpayer in market relations its effects remain poorly understood. This is the object of this thesis: it focuses on the implementation of the ICR loans around which a market-based solution had been organised.The analysis studies the application of expert knowledge established as part of market formation processes, foregrounding the calculative practices that had become central to measuring the efficacy of the market. It places emphasis on the particular forms the HE market takes as the moral, power, and temporal dynamics that constitute debt obligations.
At the centre of this thesis is Michel Callon’s concept of problematisation which follows the ways actors define problems with obligatory courses of action required to achieve resolution. It is applied alongside literature in the social studies of markets to explain how the state governs non-market areas, such as HE to achieve predefined goals. As well as providing a means to engage with the entangling of participants into market relations and the distribution of obligations. Studying the ICR loans from a governance perspective challenges key assumptions about debt in Marxist or Foucauldian inspired literature that signifies indebtedness as readily applied to explain the exploitation of debtors by market forces in absence of the state. In so doing, the thesis argues that participants are entangled into particular market relations around the obligations of student loan debt. It is these obligations, that are integral to what is evaluated as problematic and comes to require repair in the HE market. In particular, the thesis draws attention to the ways market problems are articulated, evaluated and resolved, and the actors that come to be entangled with these solutions. In doing so the thesis contributes towards political and cultural economy studies of debt in terms of the heuristic evaluation of indebtedness, by developing the social studies of markets conceptual framework to evaluate student loans as methodologically connected to market and market making processes.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Johnna Montgomerie (Supervisor) & Chris Holmes (Supervisor) |