‘Just get them over the line’: Neoliberalism and the execution of ‘excellence’

Higher Education institutions, at least in nominal ‘Western’ contexts, oversell a dressed-up version of ‘excellence’ to draw in students, but they have more firmly in their sight a vision of the commercial bottom line. This research study, firmly grounded in the author’s experience of postgraduate education, posits that the marketised, neoliberal conception of ‘excellence’ both covers a hidden truth that these institutions are content just to get learners ‘over the line’ and hides a more authent