Governing by Numbers and Human Capital in Education Policy Beyond Neoliberalism

Miriam Madsen, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Administration of Public Education at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. She is leading the Nordic exploratory network Governing educational pasts, presents, and futures with data, funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) and including 18 scholars from Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Estonia. She is furthermore running the postdoctoral project The performative effects of budgets in higher education: A cultural-studies account of how education ideas and designs are built into budget numbers, funded by The Independent Research Fund, Denmark. As part of this project, she is affiliated with London School of Economics and Political Science as a Visiting Scholar. Her research revolves around quantification in higher education governance and administration, including studies on performance measurement, quality assurance, budgeting and accounting, and higher education policy, with a special focus on the effects of quantification practices on educational design and modes of governance. The studies are inspired by New Materialist philosophy, bringing a novel perspective on the study of quantification practices to the research field. This novelty has already lead to several important journal publications.

• Part 1. Introduction.- Chapter 1. The rise of outcome indicators in educational governance.- Chapter 2. Methodological approaches: Studying graduate outcome metrics and educational governance.- Part 2. Quantification practices: Human capital and the value of higher education.- Chapter 3. Quantifying higher education with graduate outcome metrics.- Chapter 4. Graduate outcome metrics and the economization of education.- Part 3. Governance practices: Indicators, hierarchical pressures, and temporal-affective effects.- Chapter 5. Calculative governance instruments.- Chapter 6. The governing properties of numbers.- Part 4. Data reception: Subjectivities and amplified resource inequalities.- Chapter 7. Subjectivizing effects of graduate outcome data.- Chapter 8. Educational development effects of graduate outcome metrics.- Part 5. Conclusion.- Chapter 9. Governance hybridity and its implications for education and research on educational governance.