9 Tertiary Education as Insurance Against Risk – What are the Outcomes? For Whom? Leesa Wheelahan The discourse of globalisation and the risk society has contributed to the development of universal tertiary education systems in wealthy countries such as Australia, but it has done so within the context of liberal market economies. On the one hand, universal systems of ter- tiary education constitute society’s insurance against risk amidst perpetual change, while on the other, such systems individualise risk as a consequence of their marketised nature. The rationale for gov- ernment policies on lifelong learning is that education provides access to the knowledge that is needed to manage risk, but the access that is provided is unequally distributed. Different forms of participa- tion in tertiary education are reinterpreted as decisions made by individual consumers who invest in their human capital, thus obscuring the way in which social class continues to mediate unequal access to education. This provides the basis for naturalising inequali- ties in which unequal access to education is cast an individual deficit that must be overcome if individuals are to be ‘socially included’, while questions concerning distributive justice in education are no longer central concerns of policy. The first section of this chapter examines the relation- ship between globalisation, reflexive modernisation and risk. It MOSS Risk Welfare and work.indd 165 1/05/10 2:52 PM