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Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

by Joy Garfield and Amrik Singh

As the future leaders of a society that is increasingly complex and challenging higher education students need a good grasp of social, political, economic and environmental issues and need to feel equipped to propose reasonable recommendations. This can seem a daunting prospect for anyone, let alone higher education students who may have little or no prior experience of working in these areas. Students need to understand the world view of the stakeholders and the what, how and whys of the situation being explored. What is the problem situation, how will we understand it, and why are we trying to understand it? Here we describe an approach successfully used in our postgraduate teaching at Aston Business School, UK.

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1986) has been successfully used in many different contexts for complex problem-solving. With its seven-stage structure it provides a framework for structuring/framing wicked problems by initially thinking about what is happening in the real world from the point of view of different stakeholders. An idealised world without any constraints is then explored from different stakeholder perspectives so that different wants/needs for a new system can be considered. Students are encouraged to use empathetic discourse to understand the multiple perspectives of the stakeholders in the problem situation. The comparison between the real world and idealised worlds allows for an eventual accommodation of future ways forward.

Soft Systems Methodology is currently used to teach complex problem solving to postgraduate students at Aston. The module team have developed a group-based approach that has been found to produce a deeper understanding of concepts and yield better overall results, particularly given that students are mostly international postgraduate students. For most of the students their first language is not English, and they are new to complex problem-solving.

Teaching sessions are structured around the different stages of the Soft Systems Methodology. Group work is used so that students support one another in their learning of the concepts and then apply these individually to their chosen assessment topic. The UK criminal justice system is taken as an in-class example and students are asked to think about a particular complex area to focus on, eg overcrowding in prisons in a particular city. Terminology can be particularly complex and hard to grasp if your first language is not native English, so the language used to explain concepts is kept simple and a number of areas of scaffolding are used to help to support the learning.

The first task related to SSM involves students identifying the stakeholders and their power/interest in the complex situation. Students are then taught the concepts of a rich picture and they draw a rich picture as a group for their chosen problem situation using white board paper (example below). The rich picture itself enables students to understand the real world, stakeholder issues, conflicts, and relationships together with who interacts with the problem from outside of its boundary.  Students present their rich pictures to the wider group for formative feedback.

This helps with constructive feedback and a deeper understanding of the complex issue. The rich pictures may seem simple, but simplifying a complex problem is complex in itself! This helps students to understand and tease apart the complexities of the problem situation. The rich picture depicts the problem situation better than just making notes alone.

For the realisation of the idealised world, students put themselves in the shoes of the stakeholder.  This involves empathetic discourse whereby students interview one another about what they would want for a system, without taking into consideration any constraints from different stakeholder perspectives. Students are then able to expand these statements as a group to take into consideration the different aspects. From this, students construct a model which helps depict the transformation activities that the stakeholders wish to conduct to reach their desired output.

By gaining a better understanding of the real world from drawing the rich picture and thinking about an idealised world and possible transformation activities, students can then gain an understanding for the changes going forward.

Topics chosen by students for their assessment have included: housing refugees in the UK; online exams or in person exams at university; homelessness; impact of the pandemic on tourism; child marriages in India; a start up in France to reduce plastic packaging; finding the appropriate route for a railway between two cities in Germany. These are all complex and ambiguous problems that need to be understood before any potential solutions are made.

During the module students develop confidence in the application of SSM and come to a true understanding of the process of accommodating different stakeholder perspectives – especially when consensus is not always possible. What we understand from this journey is that there is no ‘one shoe fits all’ solution when understanding complex ambiguous problems.

Empathy enriches the SSM process by ensuring the human side of systems is as important as the technical side. It helps to create solutions that work not just in theory but in real, messy, human-centric environments. Empathetic discourse is very valuable to understand the voice of the stakeholders. What we have learned from the delivery of the module is that when complex ambiguous problems are human centric, then the solutions are human centric also.

Checkland, P (1986) Systems thinking, systems practice Chichester: Wiley

Dr Joy Garfield is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Learning and Teaching for an academic department at Aston Business School, Aston University, UK.  Her subject discipline area is information systems, particularly systems modelling and complex problem solving. With just over 20 years of experience in academia, she has worked at a number of UK universities. Joy is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and is currently an external examiner at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster. 

Dr Amrik Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University, UK. He has over 15 years of academic experience in Higher Education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Advance HE, SFHEA. His teaching areas includes operations management, effective management consultancy, and business operations excellence. 

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The Society for Research into Higher Education in 1975

by Rob Cuthbert

Only yesterday

I’ve been walking these streets so long: in the SRHE Blog a series of posts is chronicling, decade by decade, the progress of SRHE since its foundation 60 years ago in 1965. As always, our memories are supported by some music of the times, however bad it might have been[1].

Is this the real life?

Some parts of the world, like some parts of higher education, were drawing breath after momentous years. The oil crisis of 1973-74 sent economic shocks around the world. In 1975 the Vietnam war finally ended, and the USA also saw the conviction of President Richard Nixon’s most senior staff John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, found guilty of the Watergate cover-up. Those were the days when the Washington Post nailed its colours to the mast rather than not choosing sides, and in the days when the judicial system and the fourth estate could still expose and unseat corrupt behaviour at the highest levels. Washington Post editor Katharine Graham supported her journalists Woodward and Bernstein against huge establishment pressure, as Tammy Wynette sangStand by your man. How times change.

Higher education in the UK had seen a flurry of new universities in the 1960s: Aston, Brunel, Bath, Bradford, City, Dundee, Heriot-Watt, Loughborough, Salford, Stirling, Surrey, the New University of Ulster, and perhaps most significant of all, the Open University. All the new UK universities were created before 1970; there were no more in the period to 1975, but the late 60s and early 1970s saw the even more significant creation of the polytechnics, following the influential 1966 White Paper A Plan for Polytechnics and Other Colleges. The Times Higher Education Supplement, established in 1971 under editor Brian Macarthur, had immediately become the definitive trade paper for HE with an outstanding journalistic team including Peter (now Lord) Hennessy, David Hencke and (now Sir) Peter Scott (an SRHE Fellow), later to become the THES editor and then VC at Kingston. THES coverage of the polytechnic expansion in the 1970s was dominated by North East London Polytechnic (NELP, now the University of East London), with its management team of George Brosan and Eric Robinson. They were using a blueprint created in their tenure at Enfield College, and fully developed in Robinson’s influential book, The New Polytechnics – the People’s Universities. NELP became “a byword for innovation”, as Tyrrell Burgess’s obituary of George Brosan said, developing an astonishing 80 new undergraduate programmes validated by the Council for National Academic Awards, created like SRHE in 1965. Burgess himself had been central to NELP’s radical school for independent study and founded the journal, Higher Education Review, working with its long-time editor John Pratt (an SRHE Fellow), later the definitive chronicler of The Polytechnic Experiment. In Sheffield one of the best of the polytechnic directors, the Reverend Canon Dr George Tolley, was overseeing the expansion of Sheffield Polytechnic as it merged with two colleges of education to become Sheffield City Polytechnic.

As in so many parts of the world the HE system was increasingly diverse and rapidly expanding. In Australia nine universities had been established between 1964 and 1975: Deakin, Flinders, Griffith, James Cook, La Trobe, Macquarie, Murdoch, Newcastle, and Wollongong. The Australian government had taken on full responsibility for HE funding as Breen (Monash) explained, and had even abolished university fees in 1974, which Mangan’s (Queensland) later review regarded as not necessarily a good thing. How times change.

In the USA the University of California model established under president Clark Kerr in the 1960s dominated strategic thinking about HE. Berkeley’s Martin Trow had already written The British Academics with AH Halsey (Oxford) and was about to become the Director of the Centre for Studies of Higher Education at Berkeley, where his elite-mass-universal model of how HE systems developed would hold sway for decades.

In the UK two new laws, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Equal Pay Act 1970, came into force on 29 December, aiming to end unequal pay of men and women in the workplace. In the USA the Higher Education Act 1972 with its Title IX had been a hugely influential piece of legislation which prohibited sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal aid. How times change. Steve Harley’s 1975 lyrics would work now with President Trump: You’ve done it all, you’ve broken every code.

You ain’t seen nothing yet

Some things began in 1975 which would become significant later. In HE, institutions that had mostly been around for years or even centuries but started in a new form included Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education (later Buckinghamshire New University), Nene College of Higher Education (University of Northampton), Bath Spa University College, Roehampton, and Dublin City University. Control of Glasgow College of Technology (Glasgow Caledonian University) transferred from Glasgow Corporation to the newly formed Strathclyde Regional Council. Nigeria had its own flurry of new universities in Calabar, Jos, Maiduguri and Port Harcourt.

Everyone knew that “you’re gonna need a bigger higher education system” as the blockbuster hit Jaws was released. 1975 was the year when Ernő Rubik applied for a patent for his invention the Magic Cube, Microsoft was founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Margaret Thatcher defeated Edward Heath to become leader of the Conservative Party. Bruce Springsteen was already ‘The Boss’ when Liz Truss was Born to run on 26 July; she would later briefly become a THES journalist and briefly Shadow Minister for Higher Education, before ultimately the job briefly as boss. 1970s terrorism saw a bomb explode in the Paris offices of Springer publishers: the March 6 Group (connected to the Red Army Faction) demanded amnesty for the Baader-Meinhof Group.

Higher education approaching a period of consolidation

Guy Neave, then perhaps the leading continental European academic in research into HE, later characterised 1975-1985 as a period of consolidation. In the UK the government was planning for (reduced) expansion and Labour HE minister Reg Prentice was still quoting the 1963 Robbins Report in Parliament: “The planning figure of 640,000 full-time and sandwich course students in Great Britain in 1981 which I announced in November is estimated to make courses of higher education available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so. It allows for the number of home students under 21 entering higher education in Great Britain, expressed as a proportion of the population aged 18, to rise from 14% in 1973 to 17% in 1981. … the reductions in forecast higher education expenditure in the recent Public Expenditure White Paper are almost entirely attributable to the lower estimate of prospective student demand.” Government projections of student numbers were always wrong, as Maurice Kogan (Brunel) might have helped to explain – I thought by now you’d realise. 1975 was the year when Kogan, a former senior civil servant in the Department of Education and Science, published his hugely influential Educational Policy-making: A Study of Interest Groups and Parliament.

In the US the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, founded ten years earlier under Clark Kerr, was in full pomp and published Demand and Supply in United States Higher Education. Two giants of sociology, Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman, wrote essays on ‘Education and Politics at Harvard’. How times change.

Research into higher education

Academics were much in evidence in novels; 1975 saw Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, David Lodge’s Changing Places, and Colin Dexter‘s first Inspector Morse novel Last Bus to Woodstock, and higher education was becoming established as a field of study. Dressel and Mayhew’s 1974 US-focused book reviewed by Kellams (Virginia) in the Journal of Higher Education, and published by the then-ubiquitous HE publishers Jossey-Bass in San Francisco saw ‘the emergence of a profession’. Nevertheless much research into HE was still appearing in mainstream education rather than HE journals, even in the USA. Tinto (Columbia) reported his synthesis of research on ‘dropout’ (as it was called then) in HE in the Review of Educational Research, and DI Chambers wrote about a major debate in China about higher education policy in an article in Comparative Education.

Michael Shattock’s history of the SRHE in its earlier years pulled no punches about the limited achievements and reach of the Society:

“By 1973, when the university system was in crisis with the collapse of the quinquennial funding system, it was clear that the Society was significantly failing to meet the ambitious targets it had started out with: it held annual conferences but attendance at 100 to 120 ensured that any surplus was low. It had successfully launched the valuable Research into Higher Education Abstracts but its … monographs, … while influential among specialists did not command a wide readership. The Society appeared to be at a crossroads as to its future: so far it had succeeded in expanding its membership, both corporate and individual, but this could easily be reversed if it failed to generate sufficient activity to retain it. Early in 1973 the Governing Council agreed to hold a special meeting … and commissioned a paper from Leo Evans, one of its members, and Harriet Greenaway, the Society’s Administrator … The “Discussion Paper on the Objectives of  the Society” … quoted the aims set out in the Articles of Association “to promote and encourage research in higher education and related fields” and argued that the Society’s objectives needed to be broadened.  … The implied thrust of the paper was that the Society had become too narrow in its research interests and that it should be more willing to address issues related to the development of the higher education system.”

In the end the objectives were expanded to include concern for the development of the HE sector, but the Society’s direction was not wholly settled, according to Shattock. Moreover: “Both in 1973-74 and 1974-75 there was great concern about the Society’s continued financial viability, and in 1976 the Society moved its premises out of London to the University of Surrey where it was offered favourable terms.” (Someone Saved My Life Tonight). In 1976 Lewis Elton of Surrey, one of SRHE’s founders, would become Chair of the Society when the incumbent Roy Niblett suffered ill health. It was the same year that the principal inspiration for the foundation of SRHE (as Shattock put it), Nicholas Malleson, died at only 52. SRHE’s finances were soon back on an even keel but It would be more than 25 years before they achieved long-term stability.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.

[1] The top selling single of 1975 was Bye Bye Baby by the Bay City Rollers, and the Eurovision Song Contest was won by Ding-a-Dong. The album charts were dominated by greatest hit albums from Elton John, Tom Jones, The Stylistics, Perry Como, Engelbert Humperdinck and Jim Reeves. I rest my case. As always, there were some exceptions.


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Key trends in Latin American higher education: private institutions, diversity, and online learning

by Maria-Ligia Barbosa

In Latin America, higher education has undergone intense transformation. In the 1950s, there were around 700,000 students; by 1970 the number had increased to 1.9 million, reaching 8.4 million in 1990, 25 million students in 2011, and 30 million in 2019. HE systems in these countries vary greatly. There are countries like Argentina, Chile and Uruguay that are universalised (with a gross enrolment rate of over 60%), while countries like Brazil and Peru are going through the process of massification. The participation of the private sector is very uneven. Argentina and Uruguay have a high proportion of HE in the public sector, while Brazil, and Chile, conversely, have a predominance of enrolments in the private sector. Brazil and Chile opted to keep a relatively small and closed public system and open up space for the private sector. In Argentina and Uruguay, the demand for higher education was met by the public sector.

Latin American HE systems are organised, in general terms, into institutional types that distinguish university institutions from other non-university academic organisations. However, there are relevant differences in dimensions such as governance, size, selectivity and educational offer. Everywhere the university sector tends to have greater administrative and academic autonomy than its non-university counterpart, concentrates on offering long-term and academically oriented courses, and is more selective in academic and socioeconomic terms, as in Brazil, Peru, and Chile. On the other hand, non-university institutions concentrate on vocational or technical-professional courses, of short duration and teacher training, as in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, or are characterised by an offer focused mainly on teaching, with little involvement in research, as in Brazil.

Our group received a 2022 SRHE Research Award leading to a report: Measuring the relationship between institutional diversity and student equity in Latin America countries. The award enabled us to systematise information and analyse HE systems in the five Latin American countries mentioned above. From a conceptual point of view, we drew up a typology of higher education institutions and discussed it with experts.

A distinctive feature of this typology is the method by which it was constructed: different from what is usual in studies of this kind, we did not use administrative categories or theoretically discovered groups. In our analysis, the institutional types, or groups of institutions, arise from empirical data submitted to statistical procedures shown in the literature.

Following this approach, we found that in addition to the contrast between public and private higher education institutions (HEIs), the size of institutions influenced the dynamics of expansion. Notably, Brazil’s higher education system expanded by reducing institutional diversity and concentrating student enrolments. An example could be seen in the first group of HEIs that appeared in this analysis, with a strong enrolment concentration (88 private institutions enrolling 2,730,061 students) and the prevalence of online education. This increase in enrolments was balanced by a noticeable decline in enrolments at traditional and elite institutions.

Our findings suggest that other Latin American countries exhibit institutional patterns similar to that in Brazil. Each system is divided between universities, which tend to be more selective both socioeconomically and academically, and other institutions that focus on lower-prestige, short-term, non-university programs. Universities have an important organizational role in higher education and keep a high degree of legally defined autonomy.

On the other side, the institutional models chosen for teacher training play a key role in shaping differences between countries. The same can be said of the role of private sector that sets Brazil, Chile, and Peru apart from Argentina and Uruguay. However, this distinction is not absolute, as differences among the more privatised HE systems can be traced to the strength or weakness of regulatory institutions. A striking difference among these countries is the extent and role of distance education.

Brazil’s system, dominated by private institutions and heavily reliant on online courses, presents challenges for research into institutional diversity and modality of delivering higher education. The private HE sector in Brazil developed as part of the diversification associated with the first steps of enrolment expansion in the 1960s. However, in the 1990s, enrolment in the private HE sector in Brazil surpassed that of the public sector. The expansion of the private sector was encouraged by changes in education policy and the growth of the middle class, which began to demand more places in higher education. By 1995, enrolments in private institutions were already higher than in public ones, and this trend was consolidated in the following years. Distance learning has also grown exponentially, from 10 courses in 2000 to 10,534 in 2023. In that year, two thirds of the 4,983,992 first-year students opted for distance education, almost all of them (97 per cent) in private institutions.

These figures characterise the Brazilian HE system and have led to an intense political debate on the regulation of distance education and the quality of education in the private sector. In terms of research on institutional diversification, the formation of huge educational conglomerates that bring together very similar institutions seems to point to economic factors of isomorphism. It is possible to hypothesise that the institutional logic oriented towards market action is generalised in the private sector, crystallising an opposition to the logic prevailing in the public sector, which is more oriented towards academic agency. This opposition is emphasised in the more superficial political debate and obscures the subtleties and specificities of the process of diversified expansion of higher education. For example, the impossibility (human and geographical) of offering face-to-face courses in remote regions of the country. Or the possibility of producing innovation in public research universities in partnership with large technology companies.

Analysing the Brazilian case produced debate and made it possible to highlight some key issues for comparing the countries taking part in our project: the role of the university in higher education as a whole; the timing and speed of the expansion of HE; whether HE comprised one or several systems in each country; the different training paths, careers and types of degrees; the modality of delivery of HE; public or private funding of HE; the existence of institutions for the collection and dissemination of data.

We used the concept of institutional types to express the diverse reality of institutions in idealised typical forms – rational in their functioning and unilateral in defining the dominant feature. To organise this variety of elements in a coherent and compatible way we focused on the governance dimension of the higher education system.  The concept of governance allows us to understand the logics of institutional functioning within the HE system and in national society. Governance models define the contours of HE systems, set up the role of the university, the types of careers and degrees, and the ways in which relevant data are collected and disseminated.

As there are several studies on the constituent elements of governance of higher education systems in the countries studied, we decided to sort this material by considering historical lines of their evolution. Starting with the creation of the first institutions, we studied the constitution of specific legislation, the process of expansion, the definition of purposes, the evolution of funding, structure, forms of supervision and evaluation.

The refinement of our conceptual tool (the typology of higher education institutions) highlighted these issues, directing our focus to the dimension of governance. Meanwhile a methodological problem appeared with great force: the different nomenclatures to name the processes, facts, agents and results of the functioning of HEIs in each country or group of countries. The simplest example is the term ‘licenciatura’ – difficult to translate into English – which in Argentina refers to graduates of the university system in the more traditional academic or professional careers, while in Brazil it only designates teacher training at university level.

An initial aggregation of what we already know can be seen in the table below. It was drawn up through dozens of meetings and on the basis of the available literature and that produced by the group’s researchers, as well as official data provided on the websites of ministries of education. As is easy to see, this is still scattered information that needs a more refined conceptual treatment.

To make any kind of comparison between HE structures in different countries it is necessary to analyse them carefully, based on an in-depth understanding of each country’s reality. Each object of interest or each dimension of the institutional typology unfolds into a research question to be analysed in detail.

Our study has provided important tools for analysing fundamental issues, relevant for informing public policies and the actions of public or private institutional leaders. We offer socially and historically informed answers to questions about what higher education is, and what and whom it is for in different countries.

And this is just the beginning: our project includes stages for analysing the efficiency and equity of the different ways of organising higher education. It envisages understanding how higher education impacts on graduates’ careers, on their professional destinies. At the same time, it strives for explaining the extent to which the impacts of higher education are independent of the social origin, gender or race of the students.

Maria-Ligia Barbosa is Associate Professor of Sociology/LAPES/PPGSA/UFRJ, in the LAPES Laboratory for Research on Higher Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and holder of the Carlos Hasenbalg Chair/CELAPES/CBAE/UFRJ. http://lattes.cnpq.br/5436482713562659 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7922-8643

This article represents the hard work of the LAPES team: André Pires, André Vieira, Leonardo Rodrigues and Renato Santos. I thank each and every one of them and take full responsibility for any mistakes. More information about our team and our work on our trilingual website: https://www.celapes.org/en

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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).

Vicky Gunn


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Interdependence and HE systems

by Vicky Gunn

My life has entered a period of dramatic change. I am not referring here to my imminent move from an institution in which I have worked for nearly 18 years (Glasgow University) to a new adventure at Glasgow School of Art. No, the dramatic change I refer to here was my intellectual discomfort around the Scottish independence referendum. For me, the last few months have involved a growing realization that the fragile imaginary social fabric (to adopt a phrase of Maurice Bloch’s) which is stitched together to tailor the United Kingdom was being unpicked by two seamstresses of quite different hues: one focused on the holistic ‘sew the patchwork quilt together but slightly differently’ argument, the other on the ‘unpick the lot and start again’ one. Both have seemed wanting in my mind, because both appeared to come from an ultimately misleading question: should Scotland become an independent country? Continue reading →