Welcome, reader. In a world overflowing with information, I appreciate your curiosity and presence. This article focuses on the marketisation, commodification, commercialisation and servitisation of higher education (HE) and knowledge in the neoliberal era. 

As a white, European, cisgender, middle-class postgraduate student in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s programme in Service Design Strategies and Innovations (SDSI), I reflect on how these dynamics surface in design education. With a critical and decolonial lens, I invite reflection through examples and rhetorical questions.

Though not an expert in economics, education or decolonial theory, I write with care, humility and the belief that inquiry begins with naming the structures we inhabit. Along the way, I explore themes such as academic capitalism, internationalisation, epistemic injustice and design’s entanglement with the colonial. Engaging with these topics may stir a range of emotions or somatic responses. This article invites pause and reflection, not haste.

Modern European universities¹ have long positioned themselves as custodians of the public good: spaces for critical inquiry and the collective advancement of knowledge through research, teaching and civic engagement.² Yet, these institutions have historically been shaped by colonial legacies, classed and gendered exclusions, and evolving state agendas.³ Over time, especially since the mid-20th century, universities expanded access and democratised education, only to later be swept into neoliberal reforms that reframed knowledge as a private asset and HE as a competitive market-driven enterprise.⁴

One of the most profound transformations accompanying the neoliberal turn in HE has been the commodification of knowledge.⁵ This refers to the process whereby knowledge – once understood as a shared, relational and intrinsically valuable gift – is increasingly repackaged as a tradable good to be priced, sold and scaled across global education markets.⁶ This echoes earlier enclosures of commons, the commodification of labour during industrialisation, and the monetisation of leisure in post-industrial contexts.⁷ Yet, as Ilkka Kauppinen warns, claims like “knowledge has become a commodity” and “higher education has been commodified” require careful scrutiny.⁸ The economic status of knowledge and education is not fixed and can take many forms, from patented research to the commercial packaging of HE as a globally tradable service.

Europe today is widely framed as a knowledge-based service economy, where human capital and intangible assets (e.g. knowledge, creativity, research) are central to socio-economic growth.⁹ In this configuration, knowledge becomes a private good, commodified through intellectual property, patents and gated digital platforms.¹⁰ Since the 1990s, EU and national policies have positioned universities as entrepreneurial actors, valued less for critical inquiry and more as engines of innovation and labour-market responsiveness.¹¹ Consequently, education is both marketised and “servitised”: HEIs operate like service providers competing globally for students, funding and prestige.¹² But what is the cost of this shift?

This pressure is particularly acute in an era where knowledge is readily available via the internet, open-access platforms and rapidly expanding Artificial Intelligence technologies. HEIs now compete not only with each other, but also with education technology (edu-tech) companies (e.g. Coursera, Domestika, Interaction Design Foundation) and vocational training providers (e.g. Hyper Island, Service Design College, Service Design Network Academy) offering flexible and lower-cost alternatives to degrees. In Estonia, HE 2035 foresight scenarios warn that, without adaptation, HEIs risk being outpaced by these companies and providers.¹³ At the same time, shrinking state investment deepens institutional strain: between 2012 and 2021, public HE funding in Estonia fell from 1.4% to 1% of GDP, raising concerns about staff salaries, sustainability and academic quality.¹⁴

In this knowledge economy and post-truth era – marked by disinformation, distrust, polycrises and declining confidence in science – power increasingly rests with those who produce, store and distribute knowledge.¹⁵ Universities, edu-tech companies and corporate providers shape what knowledge is valued, who accesses it, and on what terms. This prompts pressing questions:

The growing alignment of HEIs with market logic – prioritising profit, performance metrics and the production of job-ready graduates – has been labelled “academic capitalism”.¹⁶ While this is well-documented in the UK, where I earned my earlier degrees, it is also unfolding in SDSI: my current Erasmus Mundus master’s programme, delivered by institutions in Estonia, Finland and Latvia. All three have adopted “internationalisation” agendas: launching English-taught programmes, introducing tuition fees, and chasing funding and rankings. What impact do such strategies have on equity, access and epistemic justice in design education?

In this landscape, commodification is structural. Programmes like SDSI are packages with price tags and value propositions. Though local tuition remains low or subsidised, fees for design masters reflect market priorities. For those who do not win an EU scholarship, SDSI charges €4,000 annually for EU and €8,000 for non-EU students.¹⁷ The University of Lapland (ULAP) charges non-EU students €8,000 annually for its 5 English-language master degrees¹⁸, and the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) offers 7 such programmes, with fees ranging from €1,900 to €4,000 per year depending on student country of origin¹⁹. This tiered fee structure stratifies access based on financial means, reframing education as a transactional service and placing heavier burdens on non-EU students. 

This commodification is also evident in the marketing language used on websites and in brochures, emphasising career outcomes, testimonials and external collaboration. Diplomas are framed less as records of learning and more as tokens of social mobility and market value.²⁰ International students are cast as ‘consumer-investors’ purchasing access to design credentials and European networks.²¹

Business influence is also reshaping curricula.²⁷ SDSI’s first-year curriculum²⁸ is dominated by short, modular courses focused on design thinking, business and startup cultures. These are often favoured over systems thinking, critical regenerative and social approaches. Consequently, the knowledge felt pre-packaged rather than co-created. I was encouraged to produce market-ready solutions and assessed on impact and viability. One of my longest group projects involved developing and pitching a startup to investors. While entrepreneurialism is valuable, it also narrows creative inquiry to what is fundable and scalable, sidelining critical, relational or speculative work.

Education, in this model, becomes a performance focused on outcomes, credentials and metrics rather than a space for transformation. Learning is reduced to transferable skills and measurable deliverables, signalling not so much understanding but economic potential.²⁹ Students are cast as customers pursuing employability, not as reflective practitioners or engaged citizens.

To move beyond colonial modernity and market logics, HEIs must first confront their complicity within these systems.³² Institutions like EKA, ULAP and LMA may lack direct ties to colonial regimes³³ but still (1) operate within market-driven structures that reproduce material and epistemic inequalities and (2) teach design disciplines shaped by Eurocentric and capitalist logics.³⁴ Without addressing these foundations, change risks becoming performative.

The good news is that HEIs are not abstract: they reflect the choices of funders, administrators, educators and students. These actors possess the power to choose differently and slowly dismantle the foundations of what Audre Lorde called the “master’s house”.³⁵  Yet, many of us – consciously or not – participate in, reproduce and benefit from the status quo. We are both victims and enablers within the “master’s house”, and we must recognise this uncomfortable truth. The first step, then, is introspection: recognising our complicity in upholding colonial and neoliberal logics within classrooms and curricula, and making space for honest and critical dialogue. As adrienne maree brown reminds us, transformation begins with what we practice – “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the big scale”.³⁶ This is a message of hope, rooted in the belief that individual efforts and small-scale practices can and do reverberate outward, creating ripple effects that lead to broader, systemic changes.

Acknowledgment is necessary but not sufficient. A second step is to unlearn (much of) what the neoliberal university has taught us: that success is individual, that speed is virtuous, that impact must be quantified, that knowledge is only valid if it is published, or that design education must revolve around Anglo-Eurocentric models (e.g. the Bauhaus). We must re-learn that knowledge can also be slow, relational, embodied, ancestral, and non-instrumental. We must remember that education has not always been a commodity for sale. In many non-Western contexts, knowledge is understood as a gift to be shared intergenerationally, cultivated with care, and transmitted through storytelling, observation and lived experience.³⁷ We must deconstruct the Eurocentric design canon and make space for design histories rooted in Indigenous, diasporic and postcolonial traditions. We must remember that design is not a modern invention but an ancient, collective practice as old as humanity itself.³⁸

This is the essence of the pluriverse: the recognition that multiple ways of being, knowing and designing coexist with equal legitimacy.³⁹ A pluriversal approach rejects the universalising gaze of modernity and instead centres difference, context, complexity and epistemic justice. It shifts focus from Western, white, androcentric and anthropocentric frameworks to locally embedded, non-Western, gynocentric and ecocentric ways of learning.⁴⁰ Unlearning is not a rejection of the canon, but a reorientation away from domination and toward liberation.

A pluriversal university is not a better version of the neoliberal one. It is a radically different project. This work is hard, uncomfortable, and often met with resistance. Yet the urgency is clear: we must move from critique to commitment, from diagnosis to co-creation. Audre Lorde’s reminder that “...the master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house”⁵⁵ resonates here. We cannot transform our HEIs using the same systems that uphold inequality, but we can repurpose them toward justice, joy, and life.

As long as knowledge is commodified and education is treated as a service, HEIs will fail to equip students for the urgent challenges of our time: climate collapse, inequality, and racism. So let’s ask, again and again: