The ideology of consumer society privileges the individual with free choice. In the Western world, we use autonomous choice as the mechanism to determine our own lifestyle through interaction with the marketplace. The assumption that ‘choice is good’ is largely unquestioned in our society and in order to resist divorcing Higher Education (HE) from the context within which it is seated, we consider the role of choice in education by drawing on our understanding of consumer culture. In accordance with this, we build on the notion that an increasingly marketised HE system is encouraging students to behave as customers. We recognise in this paper that much educational literature supports offering choice to learners on the grounds that it is pedagogically effective, either through increased motivation (Biggs 2003), greater engagement and ownership of work (Barnett and Hallam 1991) or by encouraging deep approaches to learning (Ramsden 1991). However, in this paper we present findings that suggest the marketised HE system is encouraging students to manage choice as a consumer and thus to take a conservative approach to their learning.

This paper explores what choice means to British university students through understanding what the practices and lived experiences of educational choice, in assessment, subject content, pathways and placements, are for them. This study is drawn from a larger dataset involving 60 phenomenological interviews exploring choice, with students from a vocationally-oriented British university.
The interviews ranged from the experience of choosing an HE institution through to choices made after graduation. The stories we present in this paper are those of second and third year undergraduate students (with each degree course running for three years). Our focus here is on the commonalities of students’ experiences of in-course choice to provide a greater understanding of this process, although we do note some interesting consequences of the different operationalisation of choice in the structure of the four degree programmes represented in this study.

The findings of this research suggests that choice does little to move students closer to autonomous, critical thinking individuals; there was little evidence of deep learning of the subjects and even less pride in knowing the material for its own sake. In terms of identity, choice was not used to expand identity but appeared to encourage students to reduce their future selves to job specialisms in industry. Our understanding of student behaviour from this study suggests that choice is not experienced as an opportunity for transformational learning but continues to drive the discourse of consumption and further embed students into a competitive economy. In order to make sense of these themes, we contextualise our findings in relation to current understandings of choice as part of the student’s broader life world, as well as its role in UK HE and as the foundation of a consumer society. We draw on theories of self-identity (including Giddens 1991 and Gabriel and Lang 2006) in which to seat our analysis and to explore how students create current and future selves through the choice we offer in HE. By considering the consequences, we are able to reconsider the purpose of offering choice in HE.