Constructing the higher education student: a comparative study of six European countries
We are delighted that our book, ‘Constructing the Higher Education Student: perspectives from across Europe’ has recently been published. This draws together key findings from the project as a whole, and discuss six key constructions of students – as ‘in transition’; citizens; learners and hard-workers; future workers; stressed; and a threat or object of criticism.
It is available open access, and you can download a copy here.
Recordings of the presentations given at our project conference in June 2021 are now available on the project website. You can watch them all here.
What does it mean to be a contemporary higher education student?
FREE online conference, University of Surrey on 17 June (13:00 – 16.35) & 18 June (9.30 -13:00) 2021 (BST)
Being a higher education student is an increasingly common experience across the world, with participation rates at or above 50 per cent in many nations. Nevertheless, there is relatively little debate about what being a contemporary higher education student actually means. While stereotypes of students are regularly deployed in the media and, in countries where high fees are charged, assumptions are frequently made about students becoming more ‘consumer-like’ in their orientation – empirical evidence is often solely lacking. This conference aims to redress this omission by exploring understandings of contemporary higher education students.
The conference programme is available here and the abstracts can be viewed here.
One of themes that we have been exploring in the project is whether students are seen as significant ‘political actors’. In this article, just published in the British Educational Research Journal, we examine the extent to which policymakers, higher education staff and students themselves understand students in this way, and explore both similarities and differences across our six countries. It is published open access so you can download it free of charge.
We recently wrote an article for the Society for Research into Higher Education blog, based on our analysis of the narratives about students used by those making or seeking to influence higher education policy across Europe. It’s called ‘Asserting the nation: the dominance of national narratives in policymakers’ constructions of higher education students’ and you can read it here.
We recently gave a presentation at the Bologna Process Researchers’ Conference on the Future of Higher Education in Bucharest (29-31 January). It discussed the extent to which the higher education staff and students in our project believed that social characteristics have an impact on what it means to be a student. We found considerable differences of opinion between the two groups (staff and students), as well as some interesting cross-national variation. You can read the latest draft of the paper (and the others that were given at the conference) here.
We would like to thank all those who came along to our ‘Students in Changing Higher Education Landscapes’ conference at the University of Surrey on 14th June. It was a thoroughly stimulating day, with a great keynote by Rille Raaper on ‘Troubling the notion of student as consumer: Fabrications, contradictions and political engagement’, and then 23 fascinating parallel papers. You can access the full programme here.
A new article from the project has just been published in Studies in Higher Education. In it, we explore how key policy actors conceptualise diversity with respect to the student population, and the extent to which such understandings are shared across national borders. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of ‘policy influencers’ in six European countries and an analysis of relevant policy documents, we suggest that dimensions of difference are not always valued equally – with those relating to ‘age’, for example, foregrounded in ways that differences by social class are not. We explore the reasons for this variation and consider the extent to which diversity narratives are underpinned by a social justice agenda. You can read the full article here.
A new article from the project has just been published in Higher Education. It is by Predrag Lažetić, and is called ‘Students and university websites—consumers of corporate brands or novices in the academic community?’. It compares the positioning of students and corporate branding features on higher education institution websites within the higher education systems of Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Spain and Poland, and argues that there is considerable diversity in the portrayal of student applicants, rather than a common construction as only consumers. You can read the full article here.