Keywords

Since the 1980s, the idea that ‘we live in a knowledge economy’ has become ubiquitous in both public and private spheres at all scales (Robertson, 2005, p. 152). The idea of a knowledge-based economy holds that the university system can play a key part in economic transitions: a university can generate innovative knowledge and upskill younger generations, in turn contributing to new economic activities fuelled by knowledge (Bell, 1973). Since the 1980s, this master narrative has dominated policy talk. Governments around the world have increased the number of university places, with the goal of gaining more ‘knowledgeable’ workers to enhance their national competitiveness (Lauder et al., 2012).

This political rhetoric remains powerful in the current terrain of higher education. On a global scale, international organisations have consistently highlighted the importance of higher education enrolment for the development of a knowledge-based economy. For instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in its annual report Education at a Glance, has not merely stressed the benefit of a widened university system but, more importantly, has ranked the member countries by cohorts with degree-level education to indicate how educational attainment has led to economic growth (OECD, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). These OECD reports, with their idea of expanded higher education systems as economic growth engines, have influenced higher education policies in many countries. One such example is Australia’s Demand-Driven Funding System, commenced in 2012 after having been recommended by the Bradley Review of 2008. At that time, the Australian government claimed:

The Australian Government’s goal is for this country to be amongst the most highly educated and skilled on earth, and in the top group of OECD nations for university research and knowledge diffusion. (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relationships, 2009, p. 7)

Funding that meets student demand… is the only way Australia can meet the knowledge and skills challenges it faces. Thus the government is proposing a phased 10-year reform agenda for higher education and research to boost national productivity and performance as a knowledge-based economy. (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relationships, 2009, p. 5)

With the Demand-Driven Funding System, Australian universities were free to enrol as many undergraduate students as they wished. This billion-dollar scheme was cancelled in 2017 after growth in higher education enrolment met the goal that 40% of the Australian population have at least a bachelor’s degree. Australia is not unique in believing that increased higher education enrolment could boost economic growth and make for a stronger country. Today many governments, including but not limited to France (Carpentier, 2018), Germany (Ertl, 2005), Hong Kong (Wan, 2011), Japan (Reiko, 2001), Taiwan (Wang, 2003), and Türkiye (Özoǧlua et al., 2016), have achieved greater—or more specific—student participation, thereby making their populations as a whole, and especially those historically underrepresented in higher education, more productive in a globally knowledge-based economy. Enhancing national competitiveness by means of widened student participation in higher education systems has seemingly become an idea expressed across the world.

I have interrogated this phenomenon in my doctoral project since 2018. The reason why I chose it as my research focus was because I felt its connection to my experience: I was born at a time when the higher education system was rapidly expanding in Taiwan. I was the first person in my family to attend university. My parents and my older brother had little experience of this world to share with me. Despite this, from a young age I knew that one day I would graduate from my high school and step into a university lecture hall. The idea stayed in my mind for years, probably from my school days when our teachers often reminded us to think about our university major as early as possible. The idea could have also stemmed from my community, where I saw some of my neighbours moving to other cities to pursue their studies. Over time, as I reflected on my education background and thought about the global phenomenon of higher education expansion, I became increasingly interested in the ‘individual-national-global nexus’ that not only drove governments like Australia and international organisations like the OECD to invest a billion dollars in providing more university places, but also led individuals like me to dream of walking into a tutorial room to receive knowledge I had not yet learnt, knowledge no one in my family had ever accessed.

Bringing this individual-national-global nexus into my project, I began to review the literature. Numerous studies have clearly investigated the effectiveness of varied higher education policies that aimed to suffice the demand of a knowledge-based economy in different countries. In addition, other studies have thoroughly discussed how expanded higher education systems have supported national competitiveness in a global economy (Lauder et al., 2012; Marginson, 1997; Mok et al., 2013). Apart from the macro-level perspective, research has also considered how the competencies of an individual could be changed after receiving a university qualification, exploring the correlation of such a qualification with individual employability in the job market. Yet scarcely any attention has been paid to the assumption that higher education should be expanded to support economic development in local and global contexts; namely, how the individual-national-global nexus is built. At this point, I realised I needed a theory to allow me to specifically unpack this pre-existing policy assumption, so that I could understand how university degrees are shaped as a dual obligation, to both widen university provision to respond to growing student demand and to enhance their competitiveness, for the OECD, the Australian government, and beyond.

With these highlighted research interests in mind, I now turn my focus to how I sought a theory to probe the global phenomenon of higher education expansion. I encountered Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, one week after I finished my fieldwork in Taiwan and flew back to Sydney in preparation for interview sessions as part of my Australian fieldwork, the Australian government closed its international borders due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Since then, many cities of Australia have intermittently experienced lockdowns. During the pandemic, my colleagues and I were heavily affected by the restrictions, so we planned to do something together to distract our attention away from the uncertainty of the situation. It did not take much time to get everyone on the same page reading Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, which was recommended by my colleague, Remy Low, who is also the responder to this chapter. I was fascinated by Foucault’s outline on the first day of the 1979 biopolitics seminar. He said:

This year, I would like to… retrace the history of what could be called the art of government. You recall the strict sense in which I understood ‘art of government’ since in using the word ‘to govern’ I left out the thousand and one different modalities and possible ways that exist for guiding men, directing their conduct, constraining their actions and reactions, and so on. (2008, pp. 1–2)

The term ‘to govern’ opened up a perfect entry point for engaging with my question of how an individual like me has been shaped to believe that a university education is something necessary to pursue and how populations in many societies like Australia were guided to aspire to higher education, eventually resulting in a massification of student enrolment. That was how I encountered Foucault’s work on biopolitics, leading me to approach the individual-national-global nexus in the domain of the higher education system. Before continuing to explain how I found the concept of biopolitics useful in my studies of higher education enrolment, I first overview its theoretical foundation.

Derived from his lectures Society Must Be Defended, Security (2003), Territory, Population (2007), The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) at the Collège de France, and one of his most influential publications, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (1978), Foucault’s concept of biopolitics addresses an historical phenomenon and a contemporary problem: how population is governed by the political forms of rationality. Put straightforwardly, the term biopolitics refers to how the legitimacy of sovereignty can be secured while managing a population in a territory. So, what do ‘an historical phenomenon’ and ‘a contemporary problem’ mean in Foucault’s concept of biopolitics? First, Foucault’s conception of population in the political domain (2007) did not exist prior to the sixteenth century. At that time, individuals had to subordinate themselves to the divine, and they were told what was permitted and forbidden through a matrix of coercion, control, and direction. Yet, when a town grew, new populations arose. This demographic increase fundamentally changed ideas of how to govern. Sovereignty by directly ordering and restricting hundreds of people was no longer feasible (Foucault, 2007). The growth in population and attendant pressures related to food, criminality, public health, and education also challenged the legitimacy of sovereignty (Foucault, 2007). Second, the principles of state became immanent in the state itself, which now needed not merely to prevent invasion from other countries, but also to secure its legitimacy through effectively managing the population. In this fashion, the strength of the state was reformulated: the idea that the survival of a state relies heavily on its military and diplomatic power has been redefined since the seventeenth century by the added notion of the productivity of the population. With this in mind, the governing ends of state turned to maximising the amount in the treasury by enhancing the productivity of each and all (Foucault, 2020).

Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is not well defined, but it remains a helpful approach to understanding the co-evolution of modern statehood and the subjectivities of a population. It concerns how the emergence of the modern nation-state corresponds with the need to shape the subjectivity of those that inhabit its territory (Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991; Simons, 2006). Following this argument, population is understood as the centre of political concerns; specifically, the enhancement of productivity on both individual and societal scales. As Foucault (2008, p. 317) elaborates, ‘rationalised problems posed to governmental actions that are based on the demographic characteristics, such as health, hygiene, race, and education’ represent population management that in its depths and details aims to secure the raison d’être of statehood: to sustain productivity for the survival of state.

What Foucault tries to stress here is that exercised sovereign power must cohere with biological existence (Lemke, 2011), reflecting two main principles in the concept of biopolitics: population and governing knowledge. For Foucault, population is not simply understood as a sum of subjects who inhabit a territory, but rather a combination of variables dependent on different factors (e.g., gender, income, and age) and things (i.e., resources, means of subsistence, and the territory with its specific qualities) (Foucault, 2007). It shapes the idea of government as disposing and arranging things with the aim of addressing emerging problems regarding the lives of people. Population management, for Foucault (2008), relies on a specific type of knowledge to address emerging problems. Foucault argues that the historical evolution of population management in Western European countries is entangled in an idea of household administration requiring individuals within a family to direct their goods and wealth towards the pursuit of fortune and power (Foucault, 2008). In this framework it is not possible to govern a population through listing allowed or prohibited actions. As such, effective population management now refers to the introduction of the economy into the political domain (Danaher et al., 2000; Foucault, 2008). That is to say, the modern state now aims to ensure its survival by using a form of biological-economic knowledge to effectively govern its population by both enhancing collective productivity and preventing risk from emerging problems. In sum, Foucault uses the concept of biopolitics to mark the historical transformation of the exercise of power: away from divinely appointed sovereignty towards a focus on the conduct of subjects’ behaviour with the knowledge of political economy. The notion of policy in this vein refers to the specific set of practices by which a government in the framework of the state is able to govern so that individuals can be productive citizens (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2020).

Now I return to the individual-national-global nexus to probe the alternative understanding of higher education enrolment. As noted above, the policies of many governments as well as the OECD have tied the social meaning of higher education enrolment at the national-global level to manifestations of national competitiveness, widely promoting messages that university education upskills individuals and makes them more productive, and that at the societal level, an increase in the degree-holding population amounts to an augmented capacity for collective productivity. When I read this economic-oriented narrative, I noticed how it was often based upon a differentiation between age groups. Here I give an example from the OECD’s report:

[I]n almost all countries, 25 to 34-year-olds having higher HE attainment levels than the generation about to leave the labour market (55 to 64-year-olds)… over time provide a complementary picture of the progress of human capital available to the economy and society… the trends in education attainment in the adult population (25 to 64-year-olds)… offer good overall assessment of the skill distribution and how this distribution has evolved over time. (OECD, 2009, pp. 29–31)

Here, the OECD refers to those aged 25–64 and 55–64 as, respectively, the ‘skilled adult’ and ‘nearly-retired’ cohorts in the labour market, arguably implying that 25- to 34-year-olds were a newly joined division of human capital in the workforce. In other words, the classification of 25- to 34-year-olds presents a type of political-economic basis for institutions like the OECD to ‘know’ the ‘latest human capital’ of a country through the index of education attainment and reflects ‘the necessity of understanding the characteristics, structures and trends of [a] population in order to manage them or to compensate for what they could not control’ (Taylor, 2014, p. 46). To date, the 25- to 34-year-old population having at least a bachelor’s degree has been one of the most common indicators for measuring the change in higher education attainment between different generations or countries. As Foucault (2003) argues, the age of the population was the main concern of modern state because it allows state to foresee a sapping of the populations strength, a shortening of the working week, wasted energy, and monetary costs (pp. 244). This creation of demographic groups and populational characteristics, as Popkewitz and Lindblad (2020) note, is a way to think about and plan to rectify ‘harmful’ social and economic conditions. Using Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, we can see how a population can be managed according to different vectors based on these characteristics—demographic classification based on economic knowledge of human capital is not only used for optimising collective productivity, but also to foresee the change in the strength of the state through the index of education attainment in the name of a knowledge-based economy.

This age classification also represents a power/knowledge regime in which individuals attach themselves to a specific ethos in order to become self-governing and productive citizens capable of acting with freedom (Rose, 1999). The term biopolitics, for Foucault (1980), is about regulation and discipline, with ‘two types of power linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’ (p. 139). As Lemke (2011) explains, it is a ‘distinctive art of government that historically emerges with liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance’ (p. 34). In other words, biopolitics is concerned with how to achieve an equilibrium between population and sovereign power and between individual and self (Foucault, 2003). As such, in this case, the classification constituted by the concept of human capital is about both demographic division by age group and the categorisation of a population into workforce and non-workforce. Individuals, through recognising and attaching themselves to a category, shape their own conduct in particular ways through subjectification, where behaviours are moralised into the permitted and forbidden. This understanding of the relations between self and others does not suggest that an authority controls the mindset of individuals. It rather highlights how social structures and relationships underpinned by a power/knowledge regime create what Foucault (2003, p. 242) calls ‘human-being-as-species’. That is, subjects are not only regulated by the sovereign power, but are also situated within power networks in which individuals govern their own social bodies. With this conceptualisation of power relations in mind, the categorisations of workforce/non-workforce and university-educated/non-university-educated produce a set of norms that limits what it is possible to think, write, and speak in a society. For instance, both the OECD (2009) and Australia’s Demand-Driven Funding System (2009) specified that individuals should aspire to university education because a bachelor’s degree could increase their employability in the job market. This understanding of the relations between individuals, population, and nation involves how lives and worlds are governed by specific kinds of classification.

Two lines of relations come to intersect here. Higher education enrolment represents, on the one hand, a specific domain in which population and state have been entangled in the name of a knowledge-based economy. On the other hand, individuals have been divided on the basis of various backgrounds depending on economic-biological knowledge (e.g., age and labour condition) and further shaped into different subjects (e.g., upskilled and highly productive groups). Rather than testing whether higher educational attainment made labour more productive or increased national competitiveness, it is important to understand how a governing modality of population was formed based on the configuration of biological, economic, and political knowledges. With the biopolitical perspective, higher education enrolment is not only about an individual student’s pursuit of better employability in the job market, but also a guarantee of social order and prosperity at the level of the population, illustrating how the life of individuals and the population comes to be correlated with the legitimacy of sovereignty.

However, the cases of the OECD reports and Australia’s Demand-Driven Funding System do not imply that higher education enrolment can only be perceived according to one approach, like the conception of knowledge-based economy, nor do they suggest that biopolitics means an economisation of the higher education system. Instead, Foucault’s work on biopolitics raises the question of ‘how to govern’ in the sense of biological existence, arguing that governing knowledge is not fixed but evolves over time. Here, I want to draw upon historical higher education enrolment policies in Australia as another case to demonstrate the changing relations between individuals, population, and state. One of the most influential higher education polies in Australia was the Murray Report published by the Menzies Liberal-Country government (1949–66) in 1957. At that time, university was described as ‘a preparation for a vigorous life in a free society’ (Committee on Australian Universities, 1957, p. 9), with the aim being to ‘educate a liberal spirit’ (p. 7). The Murray Report further explained:

It should be said that what the university gives in this way should ‘not’ be regarded in purely technical terms; The technical and specialist requirements are without doubt in themselves no less than a matter of life and death to the nation; but they are not the end of the affair. It is the function of the university to offer not merely a technical or specialist training but a full and true education, befitting a free man and the citizen of a free country. (p. 8)

The idea of university education in 1957 encompassed not only skill advancement, but also non-material betterment (which is less mentioned in more recent higher education policy documents of the OECD and Australia). The Martin Report (1964), another impactful higher education document also published by the Menzies government, stated that:

Education is as important for the community as for the individual in non-material as well as material aspects. The modern state requires a well-educated population capable of making reasoned judgments against a background of change… [P]rovide talented young people with opportunities to develop their innate abilities to the maximum. (Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia, 1964, p. 6)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the aim of higher education in Australia was notably not framed as ‘job preparation’. Rather, higher education was construed as part of a social welfare system that ensured particular sections of the population (mainly young men but also some affluent women) were sufficiently educated for industry and commerce, while also providing individuals with opportunities to develop their abilities. The meaning of university education in Australia during the Cold War era centred on the cultivation of freedom and democracy for the society (Forsyth, 2017). In this modality, which classified the population in terms of a ‘liberal spirit’, and, by extension, a non-liberal spirit, the government sought to legitimise its sovereignty by increasing a ‘well-educated population capable of making reasoned judgements’. What can be seen here is that the university was given meaning as the cornerstone of a democracy and civil society. This is very different from the current narrative of a knowledge-based economy, in which the university is merely a site for producing well-skilled labour. By showing these two historical enrolment policies, I want to highlight how variance in the meanings of university education creates different relations between individuals, population, and the state and, more importantly, that the everyday life of individuals is shaped by the way relations are formed in the domain of the higher education system.

My viewpoint is that biopolitics offers a critical lens to (re)examine the social phenomenon of higher education expansion, thereby allowing an exploration of the ways in which individuals, population, and the state have been interlinked in a specific temporal-spatial condition. When a society encourages an individual to take part in a higher education system—because an increased proportion of a population having a bachelor’s degree is assumed to enhance national competitiveness—it engages that individual in a classification that produces biopolitical effect. The construction of, for instance, a 25- to 34-year-old cohort involves the entanglement of biology (i.e., age), economy (i.e., human capital and knowledge-based economy), and demography (birth rate), exemplifying how the notion of higher education enrolment can be thought of in the sense of population management.

It is important not to forget ‘historical roots’ when drawing on the concept of biopolitics. Nowadays, a growing number of studies of the changing landscape of school and higher education systems, specifically inspired by Foucault’s biopolitics, argue that economisation emerges at all societal scales (Peters, 2007; Simons, 2006). Indeed, when Foucault elaborates upon the evolving relationships between individual subjectivity and statehood, he highlights how principles of governance have shifted from coercion and force towards the economic management of government and population. Nevertheless, biopolitics, for Foucault, is a perspective that focusses on how problems concerning population and the legitimacy of sovereignty can be addressed. As such, it is not just about dealing with economic issues, but also with how the political life is formed; namely, how people in a given territory can live with a sense of wellbeing so that the governing regime of state can be sustained. Although economic discourses built around concepts such as human capital and a knowledge-based economy indeed hold hegemonic power in our public sphere today, the Murray and Martin reports provide historical examples of how other governing knowledges have shaped the everyday life of individuals in the domain of higher education.

Building on these arguments, how can we understand higher education enrolment through biopolitics? To date, the worldwide gross enrolment ratio has reached 40%, with more than 370 million students enrolled at various types of universities (OECD, 2022; UNESCO, 2022). A growing proportion of the global population is involved in the higher education system, where their everyday life is being shaped by a specific type of knowledge regime. Populational categories give direction to what constitutes the problems, causes, and solutions regarding social issues (e.g., a shortfall of highly skilled workers) (Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2020). For me, the use of biopolitics in the field of higher education has provided fertile terrain to carve out the complex relations between population and state policies and has enabled me to ask critical questions about education politics and historical-contemporary contexts. Although biopolitics is not as well defined as many other theories or theoretical perspectives, it is one that can benefit research on higher education with critical interrogation of student participation across different backgrounds, academic recruitment, and campus and facility design. As higher education is increasingly interlinked with our life, biopolitics also helps to open up a space for reimagining the emerging challenges in the higher education system.