Constructing the higher education student: comparisons across and within European nations
- Rachel Brooks, University of Surrey
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. Thus, a central aim of this paper is to investigate how the contemporary higher education student is conceptualised 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.
It is also significant in relation to exploring the extent to which understandings are shared within a single nation and, particularly, the degree to which there is congruence between the ways in which students are conceptualised within policy texts and by policymakers, and the understandings of other key social actors such as the media, higher education institutions and students themselves.
The paper is based on a critical review of the extant literature on higher education students across Europe, drawn from the disciplines of education, sociology, politics, social policy, geography and youth studies. It analyses qualitative and quantitative research, and both comparative and single-nation studies.
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Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey, UK, and an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education. Her research focusses largely on the sociology of higher education, and recent projects have explored: the changing role of students’ unions in the UK; international student mobility; and the experiences of higher education students with dependent children. Her most recent books are Ethics and Education Research (Sage, 2014, with Kitty te Riele and Meg Maguire) and Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2016). She is currently conducting a cross-national project, funded by the European Research Council, exploring constructions of the higher education student.
