European Higher Education Students: Contested Constructions

Abstract

There are currently over 35 million students within Europe and yet, to date, we have no clear understanding of the extent to which understandings of ‘the student’ are shared across the continent. Thus, a central aim of this article is to investigate how the contemporary higher education student understands their own role, and the extent to which this differs both within nation-states and across them. This is significant in terms of implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions that are made about common understandings of ‘the student’ across Europe – underpinning, for example, initiatives to increase cross-border educational mobility and the wider development of a European Higher Education Area. Drawing on data from students across Europe – and particularly plasticine models participants made to represent their understanding of themselves as students – we argue that, in many cases, there is an important disconnect between the ways in which students are constructed within policy, and how they understand themselves. The models produced by participants typically foregrounded learning and hard work rather than more instrumental concerns commonly emphasised within policy. This brings into question assertions made in the academic literature that recent reforms have had a direct effect on the subjectivities of students, encouraging them to be more consumerist in their outlook. Nevertheless, we have also shown that student conceptualisations differ, to some extent, by nation-state, evident particularly in Spain and Poland, and by institution – most notably in England and Spain, which have the most vertically differentiated higher education systems. These differences suggest that, despite the ‘policy convergence’ manifest in the creation of a European Higher Education Area, understandings of what it means to be a student in Europe today remain contested.

Higher Education Timescapes: Temporal Understandings of Students and Learning

“…Although the level of student employment in Poland is similar to that in some of our other countries (Eurostudent, n.d.), research that has asked students (who have engaged in paid work during their studies) whether they identify primarily as a student or worker has indicated that the percentage choosing the latter is high in Poland (48.4%, compared with 25% in Ireland and only 9% in Denmark) (Eurostudent, n.d.). This has been explained with reference to the very fast expansion of HE in Poland over recent years, and a common perception that, as a result, a degree has lost much of its labour market value (Brooks and Abrahams, 2020).…”

Higher education students’ aspirations for their post-university lives: evidence from six European nations

“…Such framings were particularly evident amongst our Spanish students who often spoke about university education as a crucial means of avoiding unemployment. As we have discussed elsewhere (Brooks and Abrahams 2020;Jayadeva et al 2020), compared to students in other countries, joblessness was the major concern for the Spanish students in our samplereflecting broader economic conditions. At the time of data collection, the unemployment rate among recent tertiary graduates in Spain was 22.1 per cent, compared with 12.2 per cent in Denmark, 11.6 per cent in the UK, 11.1 per cent in Poland, 10.5 per cent in Ireland, 5.7 per cent in Germany (and 14.5 per cent across the EU as a whole) (Eurostat 2019).…”

Constructing the Higher Education Student

“…The absence of this construction may also relate to some specific educational factors. Polish students differed from their peers in other countries by emphasising more frequently that there was nothing particularly distinctive about being a student (Brooks and Abrahams, 2021; discussed further in Chapter 8) -a view that can be explained with reference to the sharp recent increase in HE participation rates in Poland (see Chapter 1), and an ensuing societal view that now 'everyone' is a student (Brooks and Abrahams, 2021). It is perhaps unsurprising that, in such a context, student life is not seen as particularly stressful -as it is perceived to be a common pursuit that can be undertaken by most people.…”

“…The centrality of learning in students' identities also powerfully emerged from the plasticine models that they made to represent how they saw themselves. While a number of students made models of books, laptops, brains, trees and flowers to symbolise learning, knowledge acquisition and growth, there was a notable absence of models that foregrounded employment or more instrumental concerns (for more detailed analysis, see Brooks and Abrahams, 2021). Although students did not explicitly position themselves as 'co-producers' or 'partners' (Matthews 2018), many certainly appeared to view themselves as playing an active role in the learning process.…”

“…In the plasticine models that students made to depict how they saw themselves and how they were seen by others, an important theme was the amount of hard work that being a student involved (see also Brooks and Abrahams, 2021). Many students made models of books and laptops to portray how they saw themselves as hard workers, and some also felt that they were seen in this way by those around them.…”