The Influence of McDonaldization on Emerging Universities' Strategic Plans: An Analytical Study of Emerging Saudi Universities’ Policies
Abstract
Since the launch of the Saudi Vision 2030 at the end of 2015, the debate over its influence on the public sectors has been ongoing. Higher education is one of those sectors, which has responded to the neoliberalism of Vision 2030. More recently, emerging Saudi educational intuitions have reformed their policies and it has become obvious how they perform through what has been called the “McDonaldization of higher education”. In the long-term, this could cause many challenges and difficulties in the universities. Therefore, this project focuses on finding out the influence of McDonaldization on the emerging universities' strategic plans by analysing their policies. The universities’ policies generally represent their practices and the direction in which they are going. The significance of the study comes from applying Rizvi and Lingard’s (2010) framework for universities’ policies analysis, and investigation of the impact of the process of McDonaldization on higher education in Saudi Arabia, caused by the recent neoliberal ideology of the government.