The enshittification of education

Successive governments in New Zealand - and probably world-wide - have failed to adequately invest in education. The training and education sector - like manufacturing and so many other sectors - have taken hit after hit in recent years, and taken those hits out on staff first, and customers second. For example, our rangatahi "18-19-year-olds specifically, will now face a double blow. University fees were set to rise by 6 percent for the second consecutive year, after years of maximum fee hikes of about 2.5[%]" (Meyer, 2025). Further, "the high proposed fee ceiling 'reflects that fees have lagged behind inflation in recent years, making it harder for providers to maintain course quality'", yet post-Covid-19, inflation in Aotearoa has been at almost 7% yet course fees were "capped at 2.8[%]" effectively falling from 2021 (Meyer, 2025). 

Wages have increased in other sectors, inflation has impacted everything, infrastructure costs have risen, and the cost of living has increased: yet salaries and contractor rates have not increased in education. Further, the services which used to be supplied because this was not a well-paid sector are also being cut. For example, on-side printer services are closing, staff parking is now often a limited paid for service, creches have closed, coffee must be purchased via student cafeterias, heating must be turned on again and again as it is on a timer switch in classrooms, and extra services - such as gym access, discounted course fees, or private use of facilities - have become restricted or cut completely.

Canadian academic and author, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay on the erosion of TikTok's service (2023):

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a 'two-sided market', where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them" (Doctorow, 2023).

I think this applies across many sectors, not just TikTok, and not just service platforms. The author thinks the same. In his words: "Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop" (Doctorow, 2025, p. 11). 

Due to the continual erosion of funding, support, and service delivery, I think Doctorow's ideology can be applied to what we are experiencing in education as "the enshittification" of the education sector (Doctorow, 2023, 2025).

I am not sure how we stop it. But the erosion needs to stop before education becomes worthless.

Sam

References:

Doctorow, C. (2023, January 23). The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or how, exactly, platforms die. Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Doctorow, C. (2025). Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Verso.

Meyer, F. (2025, May 22). Alarm bells sound on tertiary education budget: More students set to seek tertiary qualifications than the system is funded to support. Fee hike set to remain at 6 percent. Newsroom. https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/22/alarm-bells-sound-on-tertiary-education-budget/