Elizabeth Houghton

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at Lancaster University, funded by the ESRC. My doctoral research aims to address a gap in the literature on ‘marketised’ higher education (HE) by examining students’ experiences of universities operating under neoliberal policies.

I am exploring how university students in England engage with their institutions and courses in the context of a marketised higher education field in which they are told they have more ‘choice’ but a political and social environment which frames them as being individually responsible for the consequences of that choice and their futures, in an increasingly precarious world.

More specifically, my research is exploring:
- how contemporary students approach choosing a university and course and how this choice is influenced by economic rationales, concerns about (student) debt and employability;
- how the university as a ‘human technology’ attempts to ‘engineer’ students into enterprise minded subjects through various technologies including league tables, ‘learning objectives’, and ‘transferable skills'.

I am also an associate lecturer on Lancaster's Media and Cultural Studies Part One course; a QAA student reviewer; and former student coordinator of the National Union of Journalists.