Learning in Neoliberal Times: Private Degree Students and the Politics of Value Coding in Singapore (2016) PDF

Article Environment and Planning A Learning in neoliberal times: 2016, Vol. 48(2) 292–308...

Article Environment and Planning A Learning in neoliberal times: 2016, Vol. 48(2) 292–308 ! The Author(s) 2015 Private degree students and Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav the politics of value coding in DOI: 10.1177/0308518X15613355 epn.sagepub.com Singapore Yi’En Cheng School of Geography & the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Abstract Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2014 in Singapore, I offer a case study of how students are shaped by and pushing back against neoliberal discourses, by focusing on the ethnographic context of a local private education institute. Drawing on theorizations around the corporeal politics of value, this article examines the actual production of neoliberal subjectivities in light of a new rhetoric around the ‘learning citizen’ in the globalising city-state. I demonstrate how private degree students engaged with practices of value coding that attempt to fashion themselves into ‘employable’ future workers, but in ways that are informed by a different circulation of value meanings. These value practices – often defensive, anti-elitist, and subversive of a dominant subject of value (i.e. the ‘proper’ university student) – were aimed at recuperating and creating a separate domain of value worth. I argue that the actual production of neoliberal citizenship in education spaces need to be (re-)interpreted through a politics of value coding. This allows for a clearer view of how students themselves negotiate embodied forms of value, with and against those practices of alienation and exclusion that mark them as human capital. Keywords Neoliberal education, youth, value coding, human capital, Singapore Introduction Recent years have seen a new level of geographical interest in the relationship between education, state, and citizenship formation in the contemporary globalising and neoliberal moment (Gagen, 2013; Mitchell, 2006; Pykett, 2010). One particular theme is on how global economic and neoliberal restructuring are rapidly changing young people’s understandings of the value of education and learning (Katz, 2008; Ruddick, 2003). In many parts of the world, governments, parents, and young people themselves envision formal education as a Corresponding author: Yi’En Cheng, University of Oxford, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. Email: [email protected] Cheng 293 central tool for promoting social mobility through improved employment prospects (Jeffrey and McDowell, 2004). At the same time, international organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund believe that the key to achieving economic growth and recuperating the post-crisis economy lies in improving labour productivity and efficiency (Davies and Bansel, 2007). This has resulted in a growing emphasis on formal education as a vital site for moulding human capital to meet the demands of the shifting global economy. Under such circumstances, critical theorists and commentators have variously argued that new political-economic priorities driven by an increasingly laissez-faire economy has transformed education and learning into commodities to be traded in the marketplace (Gerrard, 2014; Olssen and Peters, 2005; Peters, 2009). Some also warned of how neoliberal rationalities are extending into the realm of the subjectivity, transforming students into calculative consumers with a penchant for competition, individualisation, and self-responsibilisation (Giroux, 2003; Lynch et al., 2007). In this article, I offer an ethnographic case study of how students are shaped by and pushing back against neoliberal discourses promoted by state projects aimed at cultivating citizen-subjects in the realm of education, by focusing on the ethnographic context of a local private educational institute in Singapore. My definition of ‘neoliberalism’ lies at the intersection between a neo-Marxist and a Foucauldian govermentality perspectives, both of which provide insights to higher educational restructuring in Singapore. While the former reading of neoliberalism explicitly links contemporary marketisation and privatisation of educational policies to the broader workings of capital through ideological reinforcements, an interpretation of neoliberalism as governmentality is more concerned with those sites and techniques through which individuals become self-governing subjects (Larner, 2000). Specifically, I underscore an emerging move by the Singaporean state towards the cultivation of self-activated ‘learning citizen’ in the rhetoric around higher education, as a response to the global restructuring of knowledge and labour markets. The key purpose of this article is to examine the actual production of neoliberal subjectivities in light of this discursive shift, through the lens of a segment of Singaporean youth between the ages of 18 and 25 studying for their first degree at an institute of higher learning, otherwise known as ‘private degree students’. This particular institute offers a range of educational programs spanning across social sciences to business and marketing. But its main vision is aimed at cultivating employable and industry-ready professional workers. This distinct goal of the private institute, and to a large extent across many others with a focus on professional education programs, lends itself as a productive site for examining how students invest in themselves as human capital and negotiate ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 353). This article develops a specific account of young lives negotiating the broader constellation of power structures pressing on them in a time of neoliberal change, by focusing on the spatialities of ‘one small place’ (Laurie, 2012: 500) as the locus of investigation. Building on Anagnost’s (2004) theorisation around the corporeal politics of value and human quality, I demonstrate how private degree students are pushed to strive for a form of citizenship that requires an intensive consumption of education, marked by personal efforts to market the self as well-prepared, viable, and unique workers to future employers. They do this as part of a broader representational politics that code certain bodies as more or less valuable as a future source of labour, or what (Skeggs, 2011: 503) termed the ‘classed bio-politics of human as capital’. Private degree students, however, also fashion themselves according to a different circulation of value meanings. This separate circuit of value practices and meanings simultaneously exist alongside and circumvent the dominant subject of value as embodied within the ‘higher quality’ public university student. 294 Environment and Planning A 48(2) Education, human capital, and the politics of value coding Contemporary research on the neoliberal politics of human capital formation has demonstrated the ways in which students are produced and producing themselves for global knowledge economies. For instance, Liu’s (2008: 203) study has demonstrated how middle-class youth and families in China have absorbed the neoliberal state discourse of suzhi (quality of life), leading to their search for credentials as well as other ‘complementary strategies’ such as becoming a member of the Party in order to gain prestige and mobility in their career. Urciuoli (2008) added that, apart from state disseminated discourses, educational institutions are also actively involved in enrolling students into thinking of themselves as ‘bundles of skills’ to be traded in the labour market. The observation that credentials are no longer enough to secure future prospects is also reflected in Davidson’s (2008) ethnographic research that examined middle-class students’ strategies of self- cultivation at becoming ‘marketable’ subjects in Silicon Valley. She found that these young people were disciplining and defining themselves through notions of success tied to ‘liberal’ ideals, such as authentic passions and freedom of expression. In the context of South Korea, young college students were also found to be valorising autonomy and individualism as markers of a ‘successful student’ and desirable subjecthood in the contemporary global marketplace (Abelmann et al., 2009). These writings reflect wider critiques about higher educational institutions as a vital social field in which neoliberal technologies operate, by encouraging citizens to ‘seek introspection, self-mastery, and personal fulfillment’ in the marketplace, as well as to embrace the idea that ‘capital accumulation is not an end in itself, but a means of reinvention’ (Freeman, 2011: 356). Ethnographic research has also pointed to how neoliberal production of human capital is premised on a politics of class-based inclusion and exclusion (Jeffrey et al., 2004; Waters, 2006). For example, in a study of higher educational work placement practices in the UK, Allen et al. (2013: 10) found that the way in which young people fashion themselves in the image of the neoliberal creative worker ‘is located within systems of classification that work in the interests of the privileged’. Middle-class youth often found themselves more confident and comfortable inhabiting the cosmopolitan subjectivity of the creative worker than their working-class counterpart (see also Allen and Hollingworth, 2013). What this suggests is the privileging of an elitist and middle-class ethos that is embedded within neoliberal discourses of human capital. But even for middle-class youth who appear to profit from neoliberal practices of accumulation, their relentless pursuit of cultural capital through education has led to an intensification of stress and pressure (Davidson, 2008; Liu, 2008). These studies demonstrated the manner in which embodied differences and localised practices intersect with neoliberalising education in ways that exacerbate, rather than alleviate, existing relations of alienation and privilege. Additionally, three critical insights about ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ have emerged from these culturally sensitive political economic analyses of education. First, neoliberalism touches down into the everyday life of different people at different places in conversation with existing state disciplinary regimes, cultural logics, and subject positions (Castree, 2006; Ong, 2007). There is never a singular narrative of neoliberalism, but only multiple neoliberal logics that always emerge in relation to ‘on-the-ground’ social relations, thereby generating subjectivities that are relational and interactive (Kipnis, 2011). Second, the fields in and through which neoliberalism is played out are thoroughly shot through with tensions around class and privilege. Third, young people do not absorb neoliberal discourses passively, but rather draw on them to develop strategies to rework misrecognitions and identities. Therefore, young people are both subjects and actors who are investing in their own social reproduction through a complex biopolitics of ‘pushing Cheng 295 away’ from while being ‘pulled back’ into neoliberal state and educational regimes (see Cheng, 2015). If middle-class social reproduction through educational investment has become ever more intensified under the current neoliberal ethos, what of those who engage with social reproduction from different material grounds and normative concerns? Skeggs (2014) has argued that in many contemporary writings about the so-called actual neoliberal production of middle-class subjects, there is a tendency for practices of appropriation, resistance, and invention to be interpreted through a notion of exchange value. She showed how people who inhabit a separate field of material relations, such as working-class men and women, can produce autonomous values that are not subject to governing discourses centered around middle-class desires and aspirations (Skeggs, 2011). Making a somewhat similar critique, Barnett et al. (2008: 633) argued theories of neoliberal governmentality inadequately explain how social practices may be freed up from the ‘overbearing discourses and technologies of subjection’. Writing about the neoliberal politics of human value/quality in China, Anagnost (2004: 189) demonstrated through the figures of the urban middle-class only child and the rural migrant that ‘the representation of value has undergone a reorganization in the realm of the biopolitical in which human life becomes a new frontier for capital accumulation’. She argued that the notion of value/quality could be understood as ‘a means for following the transcoding of inequalities that simultaneously operates in the production of economic, social, political and affective value’ (Anagnost, 2004: 192). However, her analysis is underwritten by a definition of value that is ultimately submerged into a neoliberal framework that privileges the state’s neoliberal politics and representational power. There is now a modestly growing pool of studies that explore those everyday practices that attempt to re-code the subject of value, and in the process negotiate different senses of belonging (Kipnis, 2007, 2011; see also Kraftl, 2015). For instance, Woronov (2011) argued, using a case study of Chinese urban youth in vocational education, that despite being drawn into an emergent structural class location in contemporary China, these young people never conceded to being a segment of ‘failed’ youth. Instead, they produced their own moral discourses of human value and worth based on dignity and esteem. In the context of the UK, Brown (2011) found that working-class young people aspired towards emotional well- being and stability, such as finding an enjoyable job (and not necessarily high-paying), having a loving family, and to get by comfortably. These concrete aspirations do not cohere with the state promotion of self-empowered youth citizens who strive for social mobility. Skeggs (2011: 503) proposed that people positioned in a different time-space vector in relation to capital produce ‘claims for value [that] were not acquisitive’ but were ‘defensive, against moral denigration and misrecognition, [and] protectionist’ When the concept of value is read alongside these studies, young people’s narratives and practices around neoliberal self-fashioning can be re-evaluated for performances that go against the grain of a seemingly all-pervasive neoliberalism. In this article, I suggest that the concept of value provides a new language to investigate the classed biopolitics of subjection and invention yet to be registered in geographical scholarship on neoliberalisation, education, and youth. Specifically, I propose that the notion of ‘value coding’ is not only useful for tracing the transcoding of inequalities around human capital production; it also directs critical attention to how coding practices involve the translation of value meanings: people ‘make sense of, legitimate and give direction to value and circuits of value’ (Lee, 2006: 419), as they emerge from different sets of socio-spatial relations. Based on this understanding, I examine how students in a private educational institute attempt to code and recode value to their own bodies vis-a-vis 296 Environment and Planning A 48(2) others, and in ways that both align to and push away from the dominant representation and subject of value in contemporary Singapore. Education and self-activated ‘learning citizen’ Singapore provides an illuminating focus to understand the representational politics of value in the neoliberalising spaces of education and learning. Education has been a key pillar in the city-state’s projects of nation building, economic development, and globalisation (Gopinathan, 2007). Since post-independence in the 1980s, the state has given weight to the stance that the nation’s productive capacity needs to be calibrated accordingly to shifting regional and global economic forces. Under the knowledge-based and innovation-driven global economic restructuring in the 1990s, Singapore’s education system gave exceptional weight to the cultivation of ‘thinking’ and ‘learning’ citizen-subjects. This is enshrined in the ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’ initiative introduced in 1997 with the key objective of nurturing a generation of school leavers with a whole new set of skills, including innovation, creativity, and flexibility. Goh Chok Tong, who was then the Prime Minister, asserted that this vision was ‘a formula to enable Singapore to compete and stay ahead’ (cited in Gopinathan, 2007: 60) in a rapidly evolving economy. Under this vision, the educational priority was to ensure that young people acquire a disposition for independent learning and to constantly upgrade themselves with market-relevant knowledge, skills, and sensibilities. In order to create a seamless match between the supply and demand of labour, the city-state’s education system was highly integrated across primary, secondary, and tertiary levels to produce the ‘right’ amount of vocational and knowledge workers. Tasked with the role of producing the nation’s high-quality knowledge workers, the higher education sector is especially managed by the state through a careful calibration of participation rates, so as to maintain a ‘good fit’ between the university graduate labour and the needs of the economy (MOE, 2012). The global economic crisis in the late 2000s has led to an increase in un/under- employment rates and skills mismatch in Singapore, causing widespread anxieties among young people with regard to the convertibility of their credentials into desired employment. These anxieties were also compounded by a shrinkage in middle-class jobs in the Professional, Managerial, and Executive (PME) sector, a booming supply of university graduate labour, and perceived competition from highly skilled immigrant workers and students, i.e. ‘foreign talent’ (see Yang, 2014). Pressed with the challenge of creating sufficient PME jobs for the expanding number of young people graduating with higher educational credentials, the Singaporean state turned to intensify its efforts in the Continuing Education and Training (CET) plans, in its promotion of entrepreneurship among young people, and a newly introduced national incentive programme called SkillsFuture.1 All these efforts constitute a broader neoliberal project that encourages citizens to embrace a model of human capital that would take charge of his/her own development in a volatile economic world. Under this latest round of educational restructuring, the concept of education and learning takes on the new accent of self- actualisation through a moral investment in work ethic. The Singaporean government was already emphasising the values of flexibility, adaptability, and resilience in its formulation of a good and strong workforce ethos during the nation’s formative years as an industrialising country. These values were constituted through the founding ideologies of meritocracy and pragmatism that ‘sought to socialise Singaporeans into disciplined, hardworking, productive, efficient and docile worker-consumer subjects’ (Tan, 2012: 84). These work values were further sedimented by Cheng 297 the national rhetoric that produces Singapore as a small island-state with only its people as the vital natural resource. More recently, the Prime Minister asserted, ‘workers have to continually pick up new skills and knowledge. No matter how useful the skills and qualifications we attain in school are when we graduate, they will become steadily less relevant over time’ (Lee, 2008). This speech not only calls upon Singaporeans to embrace education as a means to become workers and to develop a disposition for constantly improving the self as a worker. It also reiterates the notions of flexibility and adaptability as key to how Singaporeans can navigate the changing demands of the economy and labour market. Over the last two decades, local tertiary institutions such as polytechnics and universities have undergone reforms focused on building new networks, alliances, and physical infrastructure as part of the government’s aim to transform Singapore into a global education hub (Collins et al., 2014; Sidhu et al., 2011). In addition to transforming the local public universities into global centres of research and innovation excellence, the government also encouraged the privatisation of higher education by attracting new players into the educational market (Waring, 2013). Private higher education in Singapore has somewhat been absent within the broader mainstream state and public discourse around higher learning. The idea of a ‘university education’ or ‘university student’ – the key image of value in the knowledge and innovation economies – has been tied to the publicly funded degree-awarding institutions (i.e. local public universities) throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. It was only until recently that private degree education rose to prominence, in part due to increased media coverage on the closure of several private universities such as the University of New South Wales, incidents around fake ‘degree mills’, and a rapidly growing student population enrolled into private degree education. It was also during this period that the Council of Private Education was set up in 2009 to oversee and regulate the private education sector. In the 2012 university expansion plan, the government more explicitly acknowledged that private educational institutes ‘play a role in complementing the public university sector, by injecting greater course diversity and supporting workforce development’ (MOE, 2012: 9). Additionally, for the first time in Singapore, the government recommended subsidised full-time degree programs with a core focus on industry-relevant curriculum to be implemented at a private institute of higher education: Singapore Private Institute (SPI). Ethnographic locus of research By 2012, there was already an estimated 47,500 Singaporeans enrolled in undergraduate degree programmes across all private institutes. Half of this population comprises young people between the ages of 21 and 25. The sheer amount of private degree students is thrown into sharper relief when compared to just about 45,000 Singaporeans enrolled into the local public universities. SPI was the largest private educational institute in the city-state, with an estimated enrolment of 30,000 local students.2 SPI offers both part-time and full-time degree programs that cater to working adults, fresh A-level and diploma graduates, as well as short- term ‘upgrading’ or ‘top-up’ programs for people who wish to upgrade their existing credentials. Since 2012, SPI also strengthened its own brand capital by building upon on its longstanding reputation as an institute for vocational-oriented education. The institute actively promoted the newly introduced applied degree programmes and intensified its marketing messages centred around a focus on imparting industry-relevant knowledge and professional skills to students. Emphasis was also given to preparing students for a ‘head start’ in their career and an ‘edge’ in the prevailing competitive job market. 298 Environment and Planning A 48(2) These messages were being featured prominently on SPI’s revamped website (‘Get an edge in todays’ competitive job market’/‘Get a head start in your career’) as well as disseminated through posters and brochures all over the campus, at selected bus stops, and even train stations. The impact of these marketing messages and images was most deeply felt at two SPI Open House events that I attended over the course of fieldwork. During these events, the concourse of the campus was transformed into a staged ‘marketplace’ for the selling and buying of an educational vision centred on realising professional career aspirations, forging competitive players in the job market, and bridging students into the ‘realities’ of the working world. The bulk of my fieldwork involved multiple visits to the campus, where I interacted with students opportunistically. On a typical visit, I spent about three hours walking around the campus and approaching students to start a conversation. While I adopted a principle of openness and inclusivity in terms of whom to speak to during fieldwork, a large proportion of students I interacted with were ethnic Chinese. In addition to these on-site interactions, I invited 18 male (15 Chinese, 2 Malay, 1 Indian) and 17 female students (15 Chinese, 2 Malay) for in-depth interviews in a mixture of individual and group settings. These typically took around 90 minutes each and are conducted either within the campus or at public cafes as determined by the informants. The interviews were semi-structured around the pre-identified topics of schooling history, reasons to pursue degree education, personal goals in life, and perceptions of Singapore’s education system. Most students whom I encountered were young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25. They broadly defined themselves as people with middle-income family backgrounds. Given that the total tuition fee for a standard three-year program is around S$30,000, it is reasonable to assume that young people in their early 20 s from the low- income families in Singapore, and who have yet to engage with paid work, will find degree education in private institutes unaffordable. Almost all these students were studying for their first degree through the institute’s ‘global education’ arm, where overseas programs from partner universities in Australia, North America, and the UK are being administered. Given that many students at SPI also chose their programs based on the reputation of overseas university that is awarding the degree, ‘western credentials’ remain highly coveted by these young people. The dominant ordering of value that codes higher education in Singapore privileges, first and foremost, prestigious overseas universities in the global North, followed by a more ‘localised’ competition amongst the public universities (Ye and Nylander, 2015), and finally the local private institutes that occupy the lower tiers of the hierarchy. For many Singaporean youth and their parents, possessing a ‘proper’ degree from a respectable (i.e. public) university and subsequently a middle-class job in the PME sector is key to a successful adult life. Young people’s failure to do so is largely seen as a ‘deviation’ and indicative of their ‘lack’ of self-discipline and competence. Students at SPI frequently dis-identified themselves with the so-called ‘educational elites’: those students who either study in local public universities or the ones who have gone overseas. Specifically, private degree students tended to produce narratives about value and worth that are in contrast to the public university students. The overseas ‘educational elites’, according to them, are considered as belonging to an entirely separate field of value struggle and competition. As a student once remarked, ‘those who have money or are smart enough to get scholarship for overseas studies are in another league’. The students also believed that a ‘good’ education does not equate to a ‘successful’ career, and likewise, a ‘less’ educated person can potentially carve out a distinguished career. They remain committed to this philosophy even as they sometimes saw themselves as having ‘slipped’ or ‘failed’ at some point in their educational journeys. But most strikingly, these young Cheng 299 people developed a shared sense of marginality and injustice about the denigration of private degree education. As Woronov (2011) argued, this shared sense of constraints and opportunities serves as a basis for the constitution of a distinct class culture.3 In this sense, private degree students can be said to inhabit a particular set of material relations that subject them to both middle-class aspirational norms as well as experiences of condescension, misrecognition, and precarity typically associated with non-elite people. Value coding the ‘employable’ subject Students at SPI framed their experiences of studying for a degree as a struggle for credentials marked by unequal symbolic value as compared to those awarded by local public universities. In order to compete for their desired jobs in the graduate labour market, young men and women drew on different resources to code themselves as ‘employable’ workers whose value is reflected from within the body rather than in educational qualifications. As one student commented, To compete with graduates from the local universities who are in the same field, we need to prove to them [employers] that although we don’t have the nice degrees, what we have is our attitude and also that the things we learn are based on industry relevance and not just following the textbooks. It is not unusual to hear students speak of the need to ‘up their ante’, ‘build up their CV’, or ‘value-add to their degree’ to prepare themselves to become viable human capital in the current labour market, which has been described by Hoffman (2006: 551) as the ‘new world of ‘‘demand-meet-supply’’ exchanges and ‘‘mutual choice’’’. By recuperating the body as the prime bearer of value, students were shifting the emphasis on accruing cultural capital from its institutionalised to the embodied form (see Bourdieu, 1986). Instead of relying on their degree credentials as the ticket to secure acceptable jobs and salaries, SPI students expressed a remarkable keenness to strengthen their so-called human potential as expressed in individual dispositions, competencies, and attitudes towards work. Such sentiments are reflected in the narratives of Jinny and Keith: What we lose out in qualification, we need to make it up in quality. What employers are looking out for is your potential to contribute to the company, not so much of the certificates and qualifications. As long as you can show them you have what it takes, they have no reason to reject you. (Jinny, 23, female) I know of some seniors who can get jobs in high-profile banks, you know, and people have gone on to achieve big things in their lives. This proves that as long as we’re willing to do our best, show what we’re good at, and stop the mentality we’re inferior, then it is possible for us too. When you go interview, employers want to see you as a person, not you on the paper. (Keith, 23, male) Both students elaborated in the rest of their interviews about what they thought employers would like to see in job candidates, which included enthusiasm towards the job, willingness to learn, and adaptability to work environment. As a marketing student, Keith also underlined the importance of creativity in designing strategies that would help sell a certain product. He argued that ‘creativity is something very unique to the individual and cannot be learned from the textbooks’. Jinny, who had worked for three years before continuing for a first degree in human resource management, pointed to relevant work experience as a defining value of herself as a potential employee. Like Jinny and Keith, many students at SPI have developed a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1996) by directing 300 Environment and Planning A 48(2) their energies and attention to work on their own ‘quality’ as future workers. What these students were doing reflects the argument by Brown et al. (2011) that individuals are now required to invest in personalised forms of capital that would differentiate themselves apart from others. As a result, young people who are invested in formal education have to cope with intensified pressures not only in the form of competition for credentials but also to search for ways to fashion themselves into the ‘right’ workers for the ‘right’ jobs. Within SPI, I observed that students have begun to configure certain extracurricular activities into spaces for cultivating embodied, personalised capital. A significant number of SPI students whom I encountered and interviewed were studying for degrees related to the subjects of business, economics, and finance. Many of them were members of the Student Investment & Networking Club (SINC), a popular and active student club for hold weekly meetings, provide a space for students to promote financial literacy, discuss latest news on investment and finance, and arrange for guest speakers to share insights into the career world of the industry. Student members with varying degrees of involvement in the SINC have all described the club as a space to network with like-minded people and industry experts, as well as to cultivate within themselves dispositions and conducts that are aligned to and deemed appropriate for their future career. Steve (23, male), for instance, said that SINC provided him with a platform to become better prepared for a professional career as a financial analyst. He explained, Keeping up to date with information, hearing from people who are already in the industry, all these matters when it comes to knowing what our future employers are looking for. Also, you gain confidence in knowing what to say and how to react at job interviews, so they know you are prepared and not just half-hearted about the job. Steve’s narrative point to the role of the SINC in cultivating what Colley et al. (2003: 488) term the ‘vocational habitus’, which informs ‘how one should properly feel, look and act, as well as the values, attitudes and beliefs that one should espouse’ for a particular job. The way that students undergo a process of professionalisation through the club is widely echoed by other members whom I have interacted with. For them, joining the club has become a ritual for those who aspire towards careers that are related to banking, finance, and investment. While it may be argued that a purposive extracurricular activity such as the SINC lends itself to be interpreted more instrumentally through the discourse of ‘employability’, I have also found young men and women in recreational and sports-related student societies to associate their participation with the accrual of personal capitals. These students emphasised the importance of demonstrating to future employers personal strengths, personalities, and characters, which can be amplified through a record of their involvement in non-academic and non-career related activities. As a student commented, ‘with so many people getting the same degrees, you need to show people your own special interests and strengths that makes you unique’. I have spoken to students who were members of the dance group, canoeing club, and service-learning society who all pointed to the ways their participation can be used to convey ‘valuable’ embodied qualities, such as determination, discipline, and social awareness, which could be packaged into narratives of ‘good’ work ethics of an employable subject. These point to the strategic importance of extracurricular activities for young people’s transitions into the labour market (Bathmaker et al., 2013; Brooks, 2007). Even as students at SPI were coding extracurricular activities to add value to themselves, these self-activated efforts were laden with complex emotional negotiations. Various students have told me that the constant need to be resourceful in seeking out opportunities and making calculated decisions has become somewhat of a burden to them. Shao (21, male), who had just started his second year in the finance and economics degree program, is a prime Cheng 301 example. When we met in late 2013, Shao was already involved in multiple extracurricular activities, secured two internships, and represented SPI on several inter-varsity events. He framed these as ‘ammunition to place [himself] in the best position possible’ when entering the graduate labour market. However, Shao also admitted ‘it is a tiring thing to do, having to always keep a lookout for chances to shine’. When I asked him where he found the motivation and energy to keep up with such strategic accumulation, he replied, ‘We are still young and have the energy to strive it out. It’s knowing how much to push yourself and to give yourself a healthy dose of competition.’ Shao’s response revealed something poignant about young people’s practices of coding the self as valuable subjects: social reproduction has become ever more dependent on a measure of youthful optimism and resilience. In some cases, students expressed confusion and frustration with the idea of having to fashion the self into a competitive and marketable subject: Author: Many students told me they try to build up their CV, you know, trying to make themselves more competitive in the job market. Do you? Clara: To be honest, I never thought about that. Maybe I should, but I don’t really know. Maybe it’s because I don’t know which direction to go yet. I just want to enjoy my time as a student for now, and not be obsessed with doing this and that to make sure I get a competitive edge. I think it’s good to prepare yourself early, but also I feel that it makes our education become, how to say, mechanical? Like it’s as if our purpose here is just to prepare ourselves to go out and work. As revealed in Clara’s (21, female) narrative, the project of adding value to the self is premised upon a future-oriented subject who is able to solve the ‘technical puzzle’ (Brown et al., 2011: 143) of enhancing individual employability. But not all students at SPI inhabit this sort of temporal subjectivity, especially for first year students as well as those who have yet to envision a career path for themselves. Clara was particularly critical about how a relentless search for embodied cultural capital to become ‘employable’ can be an obsessive pursuit, and which encourages a narrow, mechanical view of education as preparing students for the labour market. Nevertheless, this degree of reflexivity about the role of higher education was largely absent from the bulk of students I have interacted with at SPI. Many of them believed that a ‘good’ education involves some form of learning and training to secure a desired job. Value coding the ‘bookworm’ and the ‘skiver’ Young people at SPI imagined public universities as places where intellectual elite subjects are produced, whereas private educational institutes are more focused on cultivating students of practical relevance. Such a view is not only informed by SPI’s marketing rituals and technologies – career talks, advertising materials, and pedagogical messages designed into the campus environment – aimed at creating SPI as a space for preparing young people to realise their career aspirations. It is also framed within the idea that public universities are the society’s bastion of intellectual activities, where their historically elevated status as producers of knowledge and innovation dovetails neatly with the image of value creation in the so-called ‘new knowledge economy’. Private higher education, in contrast, was never integrated into this image of value, even though this educational market burgeoned under the Singaporean state’s neoliberal agenda. In setting up this imagined chasm between the ‘intellect’ and the ‘practical’, students maintained private degree 302 Environment and Planning A 48(2) education as a distinctive social field with its own set of autonomous, valuable pedagogical approach: It’s like asking us to compare apples and oranges. They’re just different. Private education to me promotes a different kind of learning in Singapore. Maybe more like making sure we are learning things that are practical and more specialised to our own career. (Amanda, 21, female) Down here the school is good at career preparation. We are not research universities like the public universities. You can see in the things we do, like our assignments. We don’t write a lot of theoretical essays. Most of them are projects, case studies, all these. It helps us gain knowledge that’s useful when we enter the working world (Keith, 23, male) The narratives of Amanda and Keith demonstrate how students at SPI value-code private higher education vis-a-vis public university education in a manner that cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game. Young people do acknowledge the existence of a hierarchy within the higher education landscape in Singapore, which ascribe an unequal ordering of value to cultural capital emerging across different institutions. However, this does not automatically mean that the students internalise this assignment of value. Without discrediting the value of public university education, students as SPI were simultaneously making sense of their education as ‘good’ and equally ‘useful’ in their own ways, especially for boosting the practical competency of students to navigate their future career and working world. But there were also instances when students attempt to challenge the hierarchy by claiming that SPI was ‘better’ at certain aspects of their educational approach. May (23, female), for example, felt that her marketing degree programme’s emphasis on ‘real world’ implications rather than textbook theories was a superior form of education, specifically in the prevailing graduate labour market. She articulated this sentiment through the quality of students being educated at the two different kinds of educational institutions: I don’t think we are inferior to local university students. They may have proved that they are very good with scoring in exams, but we are also good in other things. Like in SPI, our lecturers are not like professors in local universities who never worked in the real world before; they have industry experience and knowledge. So we actually get to learn from their experience and not just textbook theories. Of course I’m not saying all lecturers do this, there is this difference there, which I think is very useful to prepare us for the current job market. Actually it’s better that students learn about things that are more applicable now that it’s so hard to get a good job. May’s preference for industry-relevant skills and knowledge not only shows that education’s value is produced through young people’s reflexivity about shifting economic circumstances. It also points to the way in which positive meanings can be recuperated to create a separate sense of where the value of education lies within. Apart from May, many other SPI students claimed that they prefer ‘practical lessons’ to theory-laden lectures and classes. They identified themselves as ‘not the intellectual type’, the ‘hands-on’ rather than ‘exam-smart’ students. A memorable young man called Elson (24) was especially proud of his ability to excel in his part-time job even though he was not educated in elite institutions. He spoke about his achievements working as a real estate agent, his experience in dealing with people from different walks of life and emphasised the importance of ‘learning from the world’ rather than ‘burying heads into books’. Elson also mischievously remarked that students at public universities are typically intellectual but lack real world competencies: ‘Of course they are clever, good at studying, but that’s because they are bookworms, always in the library’. The ‘bookworm’ emerged in Elson’s narrative as a metaphorical figure that codes a different kind of value relationship between public university and private degree students. Cheng 303 It does not simply attempt to ‘equalise’ the educational value between both groups of educated youth or to carve out some ways in which private degree education can be ‘better’ or more ‘useful’. Rather, the idea of the bookworm explicitly subverts the dominant subject of value (i.e. the public university student) through disavowing the value regime that legitimises education as an intellectual pursuit. This is reflected in the attitudes of several other students: I heard from a friend his new understudy from this public university, always screwed up at work. A good example of got the system that focus too much on the brains but not on common sense. (Gan, 23, male) At my previous workplace, the kids learning centre, this new girl had a psychology degree from local university. You expect her to be very efficient and quick to learn on the job, but I ended up covering most of her work, and she’s supposed to be in charge of them. This gives me the impression that their education never prepared them well; they don’t have the skills to take on the job. (Amanda, 21, female) Both Gan and Amanda cited ‘real life’ cases at the workplace to exemplify the ‘failure’ of public university’s education, as reflected in the students’ lacklustre performances. In mobilising these ‘ugly’ stories about the so-called ‘bookworms’, these students created a narrative about misplaced value on public university graduates and their educational system. They also invoked anti-elitist feelings of resentment and irritation towards how their own worth based on practical abilities has been misrecognised and wrongfully judged – a critical awareness of the structurally unequal value regime to which they have been subjected (see Ngai, 2005). Students’ emphasis on self-activated practices of human capital enhancement also created a new hierarchy of valued subjects within the campus, one that was based on neoliberal ideas around work ethic. Throughout my conversations with students, a figure of the ‘skiver’ emerged to code those students who were ‘unmotivated’, ‘lazy’, and only interested in ‘getting by’ with minimal effort spent on self-cultivation. Young men and women at SPI referred to these people as the ‘slackers’ and the ‘blacksheep’ of private higher education. These skivers have been variously described as ‘the rich kids’, ‘Ah Sia Kia’ – a Hokkien term also referring to rich kids, but often with a measure of disdain – or simply ‘those who have the money and just want to buy a degree’. In contrast to the self-activated, responsible learner who augments the body with valuable qualities for future employment, the skiver is framed as being lackadaisical, irresponsible for his/her future, and a time and money waster: If you want to spend the money to do a degree, you better make sure you genuinely learn something instead of just doing the minimal. Some people just want to be getting by, not wanting to put in efforts. They think that in these times, you get a private degree is enough. I think they are too slack and laidback. (Shao, 21, male) I think these people just don’t want to go into work yet, just because they can afford to, and then use studying as an excuse to escape work life. (Jinny, 23, female) There are bound to be these students who think they don’t have to put in hard work, who are just here for a fast-track degree. In fact these are the students that give private education a bad name. When the society sees the blacksheep, they only focus on those few and generalise to all private degree students. That’s how stereotypes come about. (Chong, 25, male) Student narratives about skiving, as seen in the quotes from Shao, Jinny, and Chong, indicate that young people at SPI have absorbed neoliberal discourses around personal responsibility and work ethic. Importantly, I have never encountered any so-called skivers 304 Environment and Planning A 48(2) during the entire period of my fieldwork, at least in the ways that have been described by students. By talking about these ‘imaginary’ skivers, these young people were able to validate their own practices of value coding in the image of the ‘employable’ worker-subject. In a way, these narratives reinforce their belief in the state-endorsed qualities of flexibility, adaptability, and resilience to be found in the ‘learning citizen’. However, students also blended these neoliberal constructs into their talk about these people in a way that is both morally defensive and against misrecognition. This is akin to Stewart’s (1996) idea of ‘just-talk’, whereby people develop a lay understanding of what is just or unjust based on their shared experiences of certain, often oppressive, material conditions. This is most apparent in Chong’s view that the ‘students who think they don’t have to put in hard work’ are the ‘blacksheep’ of private education. For him, skivers contribute to the stereotypical coding of private degree students as inept and unmotivated, therefore compounding an already ‘rusted reputation’ (Stich, 2012) of private higher education in Singapore. In expressing his disapproval, Chong was actually using the value of work ethic to defend against a denigration of reputation rather blindly reproducing dominant state pedagogies. Young men and women were also producing a moral discourse around the ‘proper’ use of money on education. They claimed that rich kids typically take up a degree program because they have the money or use education as a means of escaping work life. The term Ah Sia Kia, used by some students to label wealthy skivers, expresses their contempt for those who were born with a silver spoon in the mouth. These rich kids can spend their (parents’) money and not take their time in education seriously, ‘just because they can afford to’ (in the words of Jinny). Mundane humiliations and slights are part and parcel of the daily practices that reproduce distinctions around social worth in educational spaces (Reay, 2005). Students at SPI who talked contemptuously about skivers understood their own concerted efforts aimed at maximising cultural profits and adding value to the self as morally superior. This is because this pattern of educational consumption reflects frugality and prudence as compared to the morally inferior spendthrift behavior. Students were coding their profit-accruing subjectivity in a way that seeks to preserve a measure of worth in the person. This is counterintuitive to the view that neoliberal practices of individual accumulation are straightforwardly directed towards the interests of global capitalism. Conclusion Based on the case study of students at SPI, I have shown that private degree students are drawn into an intensified form of educational investment, requiring them to accrue value in the form of embodied, personal capital. By shifting their emphasis to the body as the vital site for coding value, these students spent time and energy to convert different kinds of resources into valued qualities of an ‘employable’ worker. To this end, I have made a two-fold argument about young people’s self-activated practices of social reproduction within a neoliberalising context. First, I have demonstrated how they engage with state- promoted values of a ‘learning citizen’, including that of industry relevance and self- management, to prepare themselves as viable and work-ready individuals, even as these efforts can take a toll on them emotionally. Private degree education may provide a segment of Singaporean young people with fresh opportunities to secure credentials and other cultural capital; but they are also made to work harder to maintain their middle-class aspirations. This situation echoes what Ball (2003: 164) described as a ‘paradox wherein society becomes structurally more meritocratic but processually less so’. Second, while Cheng 305 students at SPI engaged with practices of value coding that were informed by neoliberal discourses, their resourcefulness and profit-maximising dispositions were aimed at preserving a measure of recognition and person worth, rather than serving the interests of the state or that of global capitalism. Young people often reproduce ideas about personal responsibility and work ethic in a bid to refashion themselves in the current neoliberal imaginary, but they may do so in ways that do not necessarily cohere with state-endorsed visions of neoliberalism. In this article, I have proposed that the concept of value coding helps direct analytic energies to the lay motives, norms, and values that give texture to young people’s actions in everyday neoliberalising contexts. By attending to the situated and relational ways in which students engage with practices of value coding, I argued that young people reproduce neoliberal discourses in a multidirectional and translational manner. To this end, I have offered a glimpse into new student cultures, practices, and rationalities that may hitherto be eclipsed by taken-for-granted terms such as ‘market’, ‘privatisation’, and ‘neoliberal subjectivity’. Therefore, I propose that the actual production of neoliberal citizenship in education spaces can benefit from a critical analysis of the politics of value coding. This allows for a clearer view of how students themselves negotiate embodied forms of value, with and against those practices of alienation and exclusion that mark them as human capital. Additionally, my account also points to the usefulness of a culturally sensitive ethnographic approach for examining the neoliberal politics of social reproduction and human capital formation (see Jeffrey, 2010). The complex manner in which non-elite students in Singapore rework, contest, and adapt to state and market norms, while at the same time struggle to carve out a space for personal valuation and self-dignity in the education system, is reminiscent of Willis’s (1977) ethnography of working-class British lads in the late Fordist period. This restaging of value struggles in the contemporary moment not only points to class as an enduring set of structuring relations but also the creative production of youthful resistance and defensive strategies that must be read alongside pernicious workings of neoliberalism. Ethnography’s appeal for fine-grained analyses draws attention to the delicate ways in which young people invest, problematise, and reinterpret the meanings of their own practices. If higher education is indeed, borrowing Anagnost’s (2004: 192) words, a ‘theater of neoliberal subject production’, then I argue that its actors are at least capable of coding their acts with diverse meanings even as the neoliberal script continues to be played out. Acknowledgements I thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, as well as Craig Jeffrey and Johanna Waters for their advice and comments on earlier versions of this article. I’m solely responsible for the final content. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Clarendon Scholarship and St Peter’s College Diggle Award provided funding for this research. 306 Environment and Planning A 48(2) Notes 1. In 2008, the government launched a CET master plan with an endowment fund of S$5 billion to improve training infrastructure, set up new specialised institutes of learning, and design programs to build stronger linkages between education institutions and ‘new’ growth industries. In 2015, the SkillsFuture programme was introduced to help Singaporeans across all ages to advance industry relevant skills. 2. All figures are obtained from the Ministry of Education University Expansion Report (MOE, 2012: 53–54). 3. Woronov (2011) had included into her conceptualisation of cultural class formation an analysis of students’ post-educational lives in the labour market. 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