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Community engagement in higher education: is its moment finally arriving?

by Thomas Farnell

Community engagement has long occupied a curious position in higher education. Universities have been expected to contribute to society beyond teaching and research, and community engagement has existed in practice for decades. Yet it has often remained fragmented, unevenly recognised and peripheral to the policies and structures that shape what universities do.

Is this now changing? There are signs that it may be. In 2026, UNESCO became the first intergovernmental organisation to specifically name “community engagement” as one of the three missions of higher education, alongside research and teaching. At the same time, universities, European University alliances, networks and national initiatives are increasingly treating engagement not simply as a collection of activities, but as part of the core identity and mission of higher education.

An old idea, narrowed over time

Community engagement in higher education can be understood as how universities address societal needs in partnership with external communities, with “communities” encompassing public authorities, businesses, schools, civil society and citizens. The underlying idea is far from new. From their origins, universities have been fundamentally societal institutions, shaped by and responsive to external needs.

The emergence of the “third mission” in the late twentieth century reinforced the idea that universities contribute to society beyond teaching and research. However, over time, this broader societal role was increasingly subsumed under an economic narrative. The third mission came to be interpreted largely in terms of knowledge transfer, commercialisation and contribution to the knowledge economy. Economic and technological contributions took precedence over broader social and civic dimensions.

The issue, therefore, has never been the absence of engagement. Rather, community engagement has often existed without being clearly named, connected or supported as a coherent mission.

Europe’s “fourth mission”: promising, but weakly operationalised

For a period, European policy appeared to offer a possible way forward. In 2017, the European Commission referred to “civic universities” in its Renewed Agenda for Higher Education. In 2020, its vision for the European Education Area went further by introducing “service to society” as a fourth mission of higher education, complementing teaching, research and innovation and together forming a “knowledge square”.

In theory, this was promising. Distinguishing a mission focused on service to society from innovation could have created clearer space for universities’ broader social and civic role. The European Universities Initiative also seemed well placed to operationalise this ambition. Yet the results have been ambiguous. While reports on the activities on European university alliances show that community engagement initiatives are widespread across European University alliances, “service to society” has not acquired the weight one might expect from a genuine fourth mission. It is remains nested within broader agendas of innovation, society and economy, regional development or the green and digital transitions.

The problem, therefore, is not the absence of recognition of universities’ societal role, but the gap between broad mission-level ambition and narrower operationalisation.

Practice is beginning to move ahead of policy

On the ground, however, something more interesting is happening. Community engagement is not only expanding as an activity; in some cases it is being treated as a defining feature of university identity and as a strategic orientation that is acquiring institutional form.

Three European University alliances illustrate this broader move:

  • The EMERGE alliance offers perhaps the most explicit conceptual repositioning: rather than treating societal engagement as a consequence of teaching and research, it describes it as its “first mission”.
  • The EUNICoast alliance is embedding community engagement as an area of institutional development requiring evidence, reflection, planning and follow-up, including institutional reporting and action plans for all member institutions.
  • The YUFE alliance, meanwhile, positions community engagement as a transversal principle integrated across the alliance’s activities through its Community Engagement Declaration 2025–2030.

In these cases, community engagement is moving from something universities do towards something that helps define what universities are.

A recognisable field is emerging

These developments are supported by a wider transnational movement. Community engagement is increasingly acquiring the features of a recognisable field: shared concepts, methods, tools, platforms, networks, institutional examples and policy advocates. The TEFCE Toolbox provided one of the first structured European frameworks for institutional self-reflection on community engagement. Since then, further resources for action planning, university-community partnerships and community-engaged curricula have been developed and gathered through the platform www.community-engagement.eu. European networks support service-learning and community-based research, while bodies such as the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities and the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education connect this agenda globally.

National and regional developments point in a similar direction, although unevenly. Flanders and Catalonia have substantial engagement activity but still fragmented policy frameworks. Ireland has gone further in recognising engagement alongside teaching and research and developing national support infrastructure for engagement. In the United Kingdom, the recent civic university agenda has provided new impetus for universities and communities to define shared place-based commitments.

So “practice ahead of policy” is important, but incomplete. In some systems, policy is beginning to catch up.

The time is now

If ever there was a time for universities to demonstrate their capacity to work proactively with communities in addressing complex societal challenges, it is now. And many universities are already acting. The challenge for policy is no longer simply to encourage isolated examples of good practice. It is to recognise and support the emerging infrastructure through which community engagement can become a coherent and sustainable mission of higher education.

Ultimately, the challenge is not to introduce something entirely new, but to name, define, connect and strengthen what already exists. Whether community engagement is called a third, fourth or even first mission matters less than whether it is recognised as a core mission and supported accordingly. Universities are moving. Policy now needs to catch up.

This blog is adapted from the author’s article in Policy Reviews in Higher Education: Farnell, T (2026) Community engagement in higher education: from fragmented practice to core mission?

Thomas Farnell is a Senior Education Policy Expert at the Institute for the Development of Education, an NGO based in Zagreb, Croatia. He has led a series of transnational European projects involving universities, local authorities and NGOs to enhance community engagement in higher education. Email: tfarnell@iro.hr

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Asserting the nation: the dominance of national narratives in policymakers’ constructions of higher education students

by Rachel Brooks

In 2010, the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) came into being. It represents an attempt to standardise many aspects of higher education across the continent to facilitate the movement of staff and students across national borders, and ensure that the region of Europe is a competitive player in the global market for higher education. Scholars have suggested that it has tended to foreground values more commonly associated with an Anglo-American model of higher education (such as marketisation and competition) rather than those that have traditionally underpinned higher education in continental Europe (including collegial structures of governance and the autonomy of academic staff). It is thus often argued that higher education systems across Europe are becoming more similar, with greater homogeneity observed in their approaches to teaching, methods of governance, and underpinning values.

This blog draws on interviews with policy influencers in six countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain) to consider the extent to which convergence is evident among the policy community within Europe, particularly in relation to how they understand higher education students. Do they, for example, see all higher education students, wherever they study in the EHEA, as broadly similar, or do they differentiate between those in their own nation-state and other parts of the continent? Analysing such discourses employed by policy actors is important, not only in teasing out the extent to which European higher education is indeed homogenising and whether distinctions are made between students of different national origins, but also because the language used by policymakers can have a significant impact on the ways in which social groups are understood and society more generally is shaped.

It was striking in many of the interviews that distinct ‘national narratives’ were drawn upon quite frequently by policy influencers to explain what were believed to be key characteristics of higher education students from their particular country – even if the available empirical evidence suggests that the characteristics were, in practice, shared by students in many other parts of Europe. An example of this is the construction of students as employment-focussed.

A common theme across the dataset was that, over recent decades, students had become increasingly employment-focussed. This was evident, for example, in national policy documents where the construction of the higher education student as a ‘future worker’ was a common trope across all six countries. Policy influencers also talked at length about how the role of the student had increasingly come to be understood in relation to the labour market, and how steps had been taken to provide better information to prospective students about employment destinations and earnings of graduates from their chosen discipline, with the intention of guiding them towards degrees perceived as having better economic returns. However, while such themes were common across the six countries, they were typically discussed and explained in national terms, often with reference to very specific national histories.

In Ireland, for example, the close relationship between higher education and employment was discussed by several interviewees. In the first extract below, a civil servant responsible for higher education policy explains this in terms of Ireland’s experience of unemployment:

Ireland’s very big on employment [within higher education policy] you see because we’ve had such a long history of unemployment and under-employment, it’s deep in the policy DNA here, in a way it mightn’t be in other countries.  Like we are all about how do we get jobs, how do we keep jobs, how do we fill jobs! How do we … that’s our central core mission.

Notable here is the comment she makes about the likely difference from other nations. She goes on to say that this relationship between education and work is not contested in Ireland because of the manner in which it has been viewed historically, and the national consensus about the labour market gains that follow from higher education. These sentiments were echoed by others. Two other Irish interviewees emphasised the way in which education was a key part of the nation’s history and culture, not least because it was seen as the most effective route out of poverty and into well-paid employment. The perceived distinctiveness of the Irish experience was thus often explicit in many of these narratives.

The Polish respondents also commented on the close relationship between higher education and employment but, in this case, it was not always evaluated entirely positively. A government interviewee believed that Polish students focussed primarily on the labour market outcomes of their study, and that this differentiated them from their Western European counterparts:

I think that the Polish student population, perhaps along with the student populations of other post-Communist countries, are markedly different than their counterparts in, in Western Europe where the markets, you know, this whole capitalism thing has been for hundred … for decades! And [in Western countries] … this attitude towards finding your … your success on the labour market perhaps is not as pronounced. 

He believed that Poland’s relatively late embrace of capitalism explained the keenness of Polish students to secure well-paid jobs on graduation and think of their higher education almost exclusively as a period of labour market preparation. Another government interviewee drew on a somewhat similar comparison to explain Polish students’ attitudes. As far as he was concerned, students’ expectations about the jobs they should be taking up on graduation were far too high, and they were often reluctant to work their way up within organisations. These were again attributed to Poland’s recent economic and political history:

In my opinion, the[ir] demands are too high. It might be because of the opening of the Polish borders after the fall of the Communist regime. When I was a student in the 1990s, it was not so easy to cross the border as a student and to spend one year or six months abroad. Now it is, and the living standard is of course much higher in Western countries, and being able to look at a better life – it might be the reason why students have become more demanding.

Thus, while Irish and Polish interviewees remarked upon very similar trends among their student populations – trends that were evident in the other four nations, too – these were explained through national narratives, emphasising the distinctiveness of their particular historical trajectory. Discussion of wider transnational influence was notably absent.

The recourse to ‘national narratives’ such as these (of which we have several other examples in our dataset), is significant because of the light it sheds on understandings of the EHEA. Despite assertions about the increasing convergence of higher education systems across Europe, the policy actors’ narratives suggest that, in some cases, national frames of reference have not yet been usurped by European ones. They are also significant because of the ways in which they conceptualise students. Words do more than name things, they impose limits on what can be said, and construct certain possibilities for thought. Thus, the emphasis on students as distinct from those in other parts of Europe may have a bearing on how they are understood by other social actors, and by students themselves.

Rachel Brooks is Professor of Higher Education in the Institute of Education at University College London. She is an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a member of the assessment panel for REF 2021 (sub-panel 23: Education).

This blogpost is based on an article recently published in Sociological Research Online. It draws on data from the Eurostudents project, funded by the European Research Council, through a Consolidator Grant to Rachel Brooks (grant number: 681018_EUROSTUDENTS).