Thanks to Michael Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron, we know more than we want to about the goings on in the Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford in the 80s. At the other end of the political spectrum there would, of course, have been activist student clubs. Students have always made their own experiences. These days, though, things are different. While students once went to university to get a higher education, now they go to be given an “experience” by that university.

The student experience is made for the student. Universities, jittery about how they will score in the national student survey, have invested in iconic new student centres, all airy atria containing banks of Macs (ideally). They offer more and more “customer services”. They do “feedback” to death.

In one sense all this is long overdue, after the neglect some students may have experienced in the past. It would be grossly unfair to question the professionalism and commitment of those who work in student services. But there may be a darker side.

First, universities are meant to be places for exploration and experimentation. The whole point is that students do it by, to and for themselves. The danger with universities’ new enthusiasm for managing the student experience is that it may restrict the potential for exploration and experimentation.

Top-down student services have to be planned. New professional staff need to be hired. The autonomy, spontaneity and even anarchy that are – or were – the hallmark of student life could be compromised. Student unions could end up as the co-deliverers of services defined by university authorities. Whatever can be said against the Piers Gaveston Society (lots), this can be said in its favour: it would never have been established by the University of Oxford.

The enthusiasm for the “student experience” is a depressing example of how higher education is becoming a commodity. Universities invest in better services not only to please students, but to enhance their competitiveness in the market by attracting more, or better qualified, students, and to boost their scores in the national student survey and league tables.

Or, to be a little fairer, more satisfied students can be seen a means to an end, promoting universities’ business objectives. Shouldn’t it be the other way round? It is a bit like Volkswagen building cars with claimed emission improvements just to tickle the eco-fancies of their customers without reducing (as we now know, in fact increasing) pollution.

Linked to the student experience these days is another management mantra: the “student journey”. This involves mapping and managing every contact students have with their universities from first, casual glance at glossy prospectuses, to signing hefty cheques as grateful alumni.

There is a real risk that the “experience” will trump the “education”. Ideally students’ experiences, whether self-generated or handed down, should support their learning. Most universities try to do this, especially through learning support and course feedback. In an unplanned, even crazy way, most of students’ own clubs and societies also have that effect.

But it may be too easy to get it the wrong way round. Awkward examinations that might upset students when they are filling in their NSS questionnaires are junked. Journal subscriptions may be scrapped to pay for Starbucks-style “learning resource centres”.

And there may be an even greater heresy lurking here, the belief that, as with other commodities, students have a right to success. If they fail, it must be someone else’s fault. As customers, they must have been let down.

Although most universities try to resist this logic, it can be difficult. Support services are endlessly elaborated, feedback escalates out of all useful proportion and action plans proliferate. More worryingly still, unfairly blaming academic staff and conniving at grade inflation, dumbing up to the market, may be added to this toxic mix.

So let’s not cheer too much for higher education’s rampant enthusiasm for the student experience, the student journey, and (the title of the 2011 white paper setting out the government’s reforms) “putting students at the heart of the system”. It needs to be decoded.

• Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the UCL Institute of Education