There is an increasing marketization of commodity services and, the authors argue, higher education is suffering heavily from this trend. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are currently subject to quality assurance and other externally imposed procedures that have been successfully applied in the private sector. This article analyses the threats of such assurance methods, which systematically ignore the notion of HEIs as sites of knowledge production, especially in less developed, emerging and developing countries with a small tertiary education sector. In such countries, public institutions cannot afford high investment without sacrificing other social and economic objectives, such as widening access, institutional diversity, community partnerships, cross-institutional collaboration and resource sharing, and knowledge transfer. The criticism in this article is directed mainly at the imposed external evaluation that is designed to compare and classify institutions, with the ultimate aim of reducing the number of HEIs receiving public funding, or at least of reducing the funding of one or more of the missions (teaching, research) in which HEIs excel. The authors conclude by suggesting that such governmental strategies simply reflect another attempt to control, and to shift the focus away from government policies that have led to the massification of higher education without the necessary injection of resources.