The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package. Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.

As neoliberalism has expanded from corporations to higher education, the notion of “diversity” is increasingly seen as the contribution of individuals to an organization. By focusing on one liberal arts college, author Bonnie Urciuoli shows how schools market themselves as “diverse” communities to which all members contribute. She explores how students of color are recruited, how their lives are institutionally organized, and how they provide the faces, numbers, and stories that represent schools as diverse. In doing so, she finds that unlike students’ routine experiences of racism or other social differences, neoliberal diversity is mainly about improving schools’ images.

How does neoliberalism in the education field shape who teachers are and what they can be? What are the effects of neoliberal logic on students? How is gender at the core of what it means to teach and learn in neoliberal educational institutions? Neoliberalism, Gender and Education Work examines the everyday labour of educating in a variety of contexts in order to answer these questions in new and productive ways. Neoliberal ideals of standardisation, accountability and entrepreneurialism are having undeniable effects on how we define teaching and learning. Gender is central to these definitions, with care work and other forms of affective labour simultaneously implicated in standards of teacher quality and undervalued in metrics of assessment. Gathering research from across four continents and education settings ranging from elementary school to higher education, to popular social movements, the methodologically diverse case studies in this book offer insight into how teachers and students negotiate the intertwined logics of neoliberalism and gender. Beyond an indictment of contemporary institutions, Neoliberalism, Gender and Education Work provides inspiration with its documentation of the creative practices and selfhoods emerging in the "cracks" of the neoliberal ideological apparatus. It was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are reshaping cities in the United States and around the globe. Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness of neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, race, and education, Lipman explores larger implications for equity, justice, and "the right to the city". She draws on scholarship in critical geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race. Her synthesis of these lenses gives added weight to her critical appraisal and hope for the future, offering a significant contribution to current arguments about urban schooling and how we think about relations between neoliberal education reforms and the transformation of cities. By examining the cultural politics of why and how these relationships resonate with people's lived experience, Lipman pushes the analysis one step further toward a new educational and social paradigm rooted in radical political and economic democracy.

Written by an impressive international array of education policy analysts, educational activists and scholars, Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences lays bare the motivations, organizations, institutions and ideologies underlying the global, national and local neoliberalisation of schooling and education.

A call to explore and map the educatıonal challenges under neolıberalısm across the globe / Khalid Arar, Deniz Örücü and Jane Wilkinson -- Challenges of school principals and teachers in private schools : comparison of Turkısh and Palestenian cases / Deniz Örücü and Khalid Arar -- Neolıberal challenges in public schools in Hong Kong : an East Asian model? / Paula Kwan, Benjamin Yuet Man Li and Trevor Tsz-lok Lee -- Principals' leadership tensioned by market pressures In Chile / Romina Madrid Miranda, Claudia Córdoba Calquín and Catherine Flores Gómez -- Polıcy-practıce decouplıng : education inspection reform in China / Meng Tian and Xianjun Lan -- Issues in pre- and primary school education in rural Turkey : teachers' experiences and perspectives / Ecem Karlıdağ-Dennis and Zeynep Temiz -- Stepping up or stepping aside? : the necessity of balancing promise with critique / Maysaa Barakat and Daniel Reyes-Guerraa -- Neoliberalism : the straw that broke the back of Lebanon's education system / Julia Mahfouz -- The neoliberal challenge to leading in disadvantaged public primary schools in Victoria, Australia / Katrina MacDonald, Jane Wilkinson and Corine Rivalland -- Educational administration challenges in the destabilised and disintegrating states of Syria and Yemen : the intersectionality of violence, culture, ideology, class/status group and postcoloniality / Eugenie A. Samier -- Commonalities in schools and education systems around the world shifting from welfarism to neo liberalism : are the kids are okay? / Alison Taysum and Carole Collins Ayanlaja -- Doing social justice leadership in challenging circumstances : principals' perspectives / Rinnelle Lee-Piggott, Dyanis Conrad-Popova and Dennis Conrad -- How leaders of outstandıng Muslım schools in England interpret Islamic educatıonal values in a neolıberal clımate : 'Brıtısh values' and market competıtıon / Fella Lahmar -- Concluding remarks : meeting at the global/local nexus of school challenges : what next / Khalid Arar, Deniz Örücü and Jane Wilkinson.

Capturing the voices of Americans living with student debt in the United States, this collection critiques the neoliberal interest-driven, debt-based system of U.S. higher education and offers alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university. Grounded in an understanding of the historical and political economic context, this book offers auto-ethnographic experiences of living in debt, and analyzes alternatives to the current system. Chapter authors address real questions such as, Do collegians overestimate the economic value of going to college? and How does the monetary system that student loans are part of operate? Pinpointing how developments in the political economy are accountable for students’ university experiences, this book provides an authoritative contribution to research in the fields of educational foundations and higher education policy and finance.