The Negative Impact of Neoliberalism in 4 Year Liberal Art Colleges

Neoliberalism is often used today as a catchphrase that implies “horrors associated with globalization and recurring financial crisis” (Stedman Jones, 2012). Commonly used when reform for market-oriented policies occur. The general idea of neoliberalism has much to do with the economic liberalization policies that are inclusive to privatization, deregulation, fiscal austerity, and free trade. Also may be used to reduce government spending thereby making an attempt to augment the involvement of the private sector in the economy (Boas & Gans-Morse, 2009). 

While the term neoliberalism has changed throughout the decades, the use of this term today has several distinctive uses. As an ideology, the term neoliberalism can mean the denotation of a conception from which freedom is a social value that reduces those functions of state to minimal. As a development model, neoliberalism may refer to the structural economic rejection for that of the Washington Consensus. Neoliberalism also can be used in conjunction with the academic paradigm, related to the theory of neoclassical economy.

The neoliberal believes in three very broad structural principles; that altruism is conducive in the free market, that the individual is the homo oeconomicus; that is the “rational economic actor whose behaviors, both economic and non-economic, are determined by a cost/benefit analysis” (Lemke, 2001), and that there is need for the minimal state intervention and/or regulation of the economy and budgets. 

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