Higher Education students as consumers: A Cross-Country comparative analysis of Students’ Views

ABSTRACT

The fast growth of neo-liberal regimes has successfully converted how students – their role and purpose – are understood in society. Scholars, mainly inside the Anglophone North, have shown how dominant policy narratives have a tendency to put students as customers. More recent research have began to discover college students’ views of this production. However, an awful lot of this work specializes in a selected usa; consequently, how students’ critiques might also range across contexts remains in large part underexamined. Redressing this hole, this newsletter explores college students’ views on being built as consumers in Denmark, England, and Spain. It discusses similarities and variations across and within those nations. The paper shows that most college students find this production profoundly complicated and counter to the ideals of education as a public desirable. Yet, different, frequently contrasting, subject matters from students’ narratives characterize the relevance of the investment regime and the level of stratification inside HE sectors in shaping college students’ information of consumerist discourse across Europe.

Introduction

The expansion of neoliberalism has efficiently transformed how we stay our lives (Harvey Citation2007). It has had considerable implications for a diffusion of social establishments, which include education. Specifically, the influence of neoliberalism on the better education (HE) zone has been mentioned within the literature through examples of pass-countrywide policy convergence, together with – inside Europe – the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the Bologna Process (see Voegtle, Knill, and Dobbins Citation2011). Although whether or not those coverage projects are certainly neo-liberal remains contested, pupils have argued that such reforms have resulted in expanded marketisation, regularly main to framing students as clients in coverage narratives (Sabri Citation2010) in addition to with the aid of college students themselves (Nixon, Scullion, and Hearn Citation2018; Tomlinson Citation2017). Studies focusing on this pervasiveness of consumerist discourse, however, have a tendency to explore this phenomenon in Anglophone countries (inclusive of England), with relatively much less attention being paid to the quantity to which this production is made sense of with the aid of college students in non-Anglophone European nations (inclusive of Denmark and Spain).

Specifically, drawing on consciousness groups performed with 150 college students in three European nations, this article generates a novel understanding of the development of students as clients; it does so with the aid of 1) imparting a comparative analysis of the way this identity is thought, focusing on the extent to which it is shared across Denmark, England and Spain, 2) exploring the ways wherein college students recognize this, often imposed however at times assumed, identity – the consumerist discourse it generates and the consequences it may have for HE practices, and 3) contemplating and discussing the elements that can form students’ reflections on this construction – such as the similarities and differences which can emerge in students’ debts – throughout the selected countries.

Overall, this article argues that many students find this production profoundly intricate and counter to the ideals of training as a public precise. Nevertheless, the approaches in which college students articulated their views varied across nations, signalling the effect of the broader social context, mainly investment regimes and cultural norms, in addition to within countries, highlighting the impact of HE establishments (HEIs) one attends in figuring out students’ know-how in their function and identity as customers.

Higher schooling students as customers: a heritage

The construction of college students-as-purchasers is multifaceted, as we can explore in this segment, however it's miles frequently discussed in alignment with rising opposition among HEIs across European countries (Slaughter and Cantwell Citation2012). These neo-liberal policy-led structural alterations have been said to have deeply impacted HE practices – for example, HEIs are regularly so pressured to operate on ideas of ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’ that they conflict to uphold the ideals of the college as a public accurate (mentioned in Wright and Shore Citation2016). Increasing alignment of HE practices and institutional perspectives alerts growing similarities throughout HE sectors in European nations – despite the fact that the extent to which this aspired homogenisation of the European HE gadget has been a hit stays largely contested.

These governmental adjustments on the macro degree and institutional reconfigurations on the meso-stage have additionally been discussed in the literature in terms of their compounded effect on shaping the approaches in which students’ and team of workers roles and identities are understood on the micro-stage. For instance, students, specially inside Anglophone North, have suggested that while universities are an increasing number of deemed as service vendors, students tend to be located as consumers – such discussions are particularly regularly occurring in numerous coverage-degree analyses across European nations (Sabri Citation2010; Wright and Shore Citation2016). For example, outlining the impact of the Bologna system on university staff and college students, Moutsios (Citation2013, 35) argues:

Within the university, control-primarily based governance is dissolving the academic network through turning scholars into ‘human sources’ with no say for the affairs in their group and college students into transient clients (however also ‘human resources’ below formation)

Similarly, within the context of the United Kingdom’s HE policy, Sabri (Citation2010) gives a nuanced account of college students’ social positioning. She argues, ‘Students are constructed as consumers who're “entitled to gain knowledge of nicely”’ (196) and that the improvement of the ”pupil revel in” and the supply of facts to students, who are seen as paying customers, are key priorities in better education rules. This dynamic between college students and HE policymaking is essential to information the perspectives of numerous social actors, specially students’, as discussed in this article, approximately the development of students-as-consumers within the broader HE panorama.

Indeed, now a developing frame of scholarship, specially in the UK and Australia, discusses what college students themselves reflect onconsideration on this construction – how those perspectives are doubtlessly fashioned by means of the structural changes mentioned above and what impacts these may additionally have on HE practices. For example, drawing on interviews with undergraduate students in a studies-intensive university within the UK, Nixon, Scullion, and Hearn (Citation2018) argue that the winning purchaser way of life within HE has created college students as ‘sovereign purchasers’ who're often preoccupied with making ‘narcissistic’ decisions about the satisfactory of offerings university offers them. The authors maintain that such inclinations regularly nudge students to undertake the identity of instrumental and passive novices. Molesworth, Nixon, and Scullion (Citation2009) endorse that students have certainly assumed a consumer identification – and as consumers, HE college students are greater involved approximately their rights, focusing greater on having a diploma and now not being a learner.

These conclusions were challenged by means of different pupils who argue that students’ views are more complicated. For instance, Tomlinson (Citation2017) identifies giant variation in college students’ perceptions of themselves as purchasers in HE settings, together with the times in which college students’ understandings do not reflect the approaches a super pupil-client need to take. In the equal look at, Tomlinson argues that students can choose to play this identity in a single example and determine to distance themselves from it in another instance, making the identification of students-as-purchasers greater fluid and relational. Building on Tomlinson’s paintings on England’s HE region, Brooks and Abrahams (Citation2018, 2 hundred) located any other category of students who had ‘never before engaged with the idea of consumerism’, signifying the constrained impact of policy narratives on college students’ perceptions in their function and identity.

The examine

This article is part of a larger challenge that ambitions to discover an expansion of approaches in which HE students are socially constructed in European nations. Fieldwork for this mission became carried out among November 2016 and October 2018. This article focuses on 3 countries: Denmark, England and Spain. These nations have been selected to represent a few range of the European HE panorama (see below) and to recognize how this range shapes – or does not form – the ways in which college students apprehend themselves being visible as purchasers.

Key functions of the sample international locations and HEIs

These three nations range appreciably in phrases of their socio-economic infrastructure (the financial version and governance regime), size of the pupil cohort (wide variety of students enrolled throughout HEIs), country investment regimes for the HE zone (the availability of loans, scholarship support, for instance), and the hierarchy of the HE area (how HEIs are categorized, based totally on their relative status, for instance) (see Tables S1 and S2 in Supplemental Material). These factors have been taken into consideration when choosing the international locations to offer diversity in our pattern, and they had been expected to be applicable in shaping students’ perspectives. Indeed, as we show inside the subsequent sections, our participants did refer to a lot of those (e.G. Investment regimes) to substantiate their expertise of the social construction of pupil clients.

Public expenditure on tertiary schooling is a good deal higher in Denmark than inside the different two nations in our pattern – this is glaring in phrases of state expenditure on tertiary education (as % of Gross Domestic Product) across these international locations (see Table S1 in Supplemental Material). Other key functions of those international locations that are applicable to the dialogue in this newsletter are:

Denmark adheres to the norms of a social-democratic welfare regime, which is reflected within the monetary support HE students are supplied with right here. At the time of fieldwork, no tuition prices were charged to complete-time undergraduate college students, and nearly eighty five% of students acquired need-based totally offers (of up to €9703). In addition, loans were available to students who have been entitled to kingdom grants.

England operates a liberal welfare regime. In assessment to the Danish HE gadget, in England, full-time undergraduate college students are generally charged £9250 tuition charges per year – no offers are to be had to college students; however, they have got smooth get admission to to loans to pay their training and maintenance prices if wanted.

In Spain – the country with a sub-protecting welfare regime – approximately 71% of college students pay an average of €1213 in keeping with year as tuition charges on the time of information series. Although no loan offerings are to be had to college students, nearly 30% of students receive need-based grants (of as much as €6682). Thus, on the subject of the investment mechanisms, Spain falls somewhere between Denmark and England.

Furthermore, the variety in the HE region differs throughout all 3 countries. For instance, we look at a extra institutional hierarchy in England, wherein the HE region is greater vertically differentiated than in lots of different countries (Hazelkorn Citation2015) – despite the fact that, to a lesser volume, the sort of hierarchical model is also rising in Spain with the increase of private universities alongside nation-funded establishments of better education (Perotti Citation2007). In Denmark, the range inside the HE quarter appears in terms of the old and mounted institutions and more recent HEIs with a extra vocational recognition (Degn Citation2015). These distinctive forms of HEIs are represented within the 3 institutions in which we carried out fieldwork in every of the three countries (see Table S3 in Supplemental Material). We have used labels HEI1, HEI2 and HEI3 in every united states to refer to the three HEIs wherein focus agencies were conducted.

Participants, studies technique, and information evaluation

In overall, one hundred fifty HE college students participated in our study – disbursed roughly equally across Denmark, England and Spain. We were largely successful in incorporating college students from one-of-a-kind backgrounds and varying traits (See Table S4 in Supplemental Material).