The research advances the research field in various ways.
First, it provides new evidence about the ways in which students are understood across Europe. The most common and powerful conceptualisations of students are as: people ‘in transition’; citizens; enthusiastic learners and hard-workers; future workers; stressed; and threats or objects of criticism. However, these understandings are not always shared by all social actors. In describing their identity, students 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.
Second, it provides the first analysis of how conceptualisations of students are patterned by nation-state (through different welfare regimes, mechanisms for funding higher education, and educational cultures) and, to a lesser extent, by type of higher education institution. 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.
Third, our data indicate that in some ways, Spain differs from the other five countries in the sample, and presents an interesting paradox: on the one hand, marketisation is less firmly established in the higher education system of Spain than in many other European countries, and policy and institutional narratives in Spain presented the higher education system as being relatively unmarketised. On the other hand, the staff and students presented the Spanish higher education system and the student experience as having been dramatically transformed by marketisation. In analysing this paradox, we draw attention to how the manner in which the marketisation of higher education is experienced on the ground can be very different in different national contexts, and may be mediated by a number of factors, including the manner in which the private cost of education (if any) is borne by students and their families, and the extent to which marketisation may have become normalised in the higher education system of a country.
Finally, our research has generated new knowledge about the extent to which students are constructed, either explicitly or implicitly, as family members within newspaper articles and policy. Such constructions differed quite considerably by nation-state. Students were, for example, positioned as integral family members in the Spanish and Irish newspapers and interviews, but typically as independent actors in the Danish texts, while family relations were discussed in rather ambivalent ways in England and Germany. On the basis of these data, we suggest that the north-south dichotomy in family relationships, which is discussed in much of the sociological and policy studies literature, is played out in more complex ways with respect to higher education.
