This paper describes how language, juridical epistemology and power is re-shaping mainstream UK universities, and how these changes create a default cultural floor that makes it difficult for alternative models to operate. It will make its argument via reflections on the second branch of Social Science Centre (SSC) in the country, in Manchester, which its author set up in 2016. SSC is an education co-operative. It will outline warnings about the difficulties such organisations face, if they eventually come under the legal yoke of UK HE marketplaces after the Consumer Rights Act (CRA 2015) the Competition & Markets Authority consultancy (CMA 2015) and the new HE Bill (2016). The language of all these documents make it clear that HE serves markets. Even if providers such as SSC wish to set up as an alternative, this paper critically questions the potential for them to remain "outside" long term, infrastructurally, but also culturally. It argues that these independent Higher Education (HE) organisations, including SSC, now have a stark choice: To enter into a marketplace or to refuse it; to take on the quantitative logic of metrics and economies, or to be sidelined in a stigmatized world of fuzzy "qualities". This paper's contribution is to describe this new scene for cooperative education, but also to raise wider questions: "Can alternative HE innovations remain outside of these structures?" and "if we can, should we?" The other enormous question is of course "how?"