Throughout Europe, students are often regular members of external quality assurance mandated to perform evaluations and accreditations in higher education. While this role has been secured through the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), we have little knowledge about how students participate in such panels and which roles they take up. In a paper presented at the SRHE conference in Nottingham in December 2025, we addressed this issue – both conceptually and empirically.
One could imagine that there are several roles that students could play as part in an external quality assurance panel. Students are most often seen as representatives of their fellow students. This has implications as to how students are appointed to such panels, as various student interest organizations usually have the power to nominate specific students to the task. More recently, the idea of students being partners has also gained interest, where a key assumption is that students should be involved and participate in all aspect and processes related to their own education – including quality assurance. The initiative “student partnerships in quality Scotland (sparqs)” is a well-known example of this inclusive approach (Varwell, 2021). However, one could argue that students may even take on an expertise-based role in quality assurance. This type of role is not based on experience per se but rather the ability to reflect upon the knowledge possessed and the ability to engage in systematic efforts to learn more – based on these reflections (Ericsson, 2017).
In our paper presented at the SRHE conference we argue that the role of students participating in quality assurance panels (or any other related processes in higher education) may not be static, restricting students to merely one role at a time (see also Stensaker & Matear, 2024). We rather argue – in line with Holen et al (2021) – that the roles students may take on are highly dynamic. A consequence of this would be that students may shift rapidly from one role to another, depending on, for example, the evaluation context, committee setting, or the issue that is being discussed.
To test our assumptions, we conducted a survey targeting students taking part in European quality assurance processes; to be more specific, we targeted the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` within the European Students’ Union. This group was established in 2009 with the aim to improve the contribution of students in quality assurance in Europe. When included in the pool, students undergo training sessions providing them with relevant background knowledge about quality assurance processes and the ESG. The members of the pool are then called upon by quality assurance agencies throughout Europe to act as student representatives on their quality assurance panels at program, institutional, or national level, performing evaluations, accreditations and other forms of assessments. The `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` therefore represents a unique entity in Europe, as it is the only European structure that collects and trains students for these roles. 35 students (of a total of 90) responded to our survey.
The students responding have on average been involved in quality assurance for more than four years, and over 60 percent have participated in four or more evaluation or accreditation processes. In line with our expectations, the students indeed report that they are taking on several roles during the evaluation processes, they are representatives of students, they feel they are equal partners within the evaluation panel they are part of, and they also see themselves as experts. In our data, we could not identify a clear hierarchy between the different roles. However, our data suggest that students are often perceived as a partner, while less often as experts. A possible interpretation here is that temporality and experience matter: students may be initially viewed as a representative and as a partner when starting their work within the panel, and through the process of participating in multiple panels over time they might demonstrate expertise which is in turn recognized by their peers in the panels. An interesting feature coming out of the data is also that the students in the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` regularly share knowledge among the members of the pool, and in that way contribute to continuously build the expertise of all members. Expertise is in this way not taken for granted or expected as a prerequisite for being a member, but rather nurtured, systematised and made available to newer and future members.
We want to thank all the students that bothered to respond to our small questionnaire. While our study is exploratory, we do think it provides new insights regarding student involvement and influence in a setting characterized by a high level of expertise and professionalism, and we hope that the findings can help future research to further unpack the dynamic nature of students’ roles in quality assurance panels.
Jens Jungblut is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His main research interests include party politics, policy-making, and public governance in the knowledge policy domain (education & research), organizational change in higher education, agenda-setting research, and the role of (academic) expertise in policy advice.
Bjørn Stensaker is a Professor at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. He has a special research interest in governance, leadership, and organizational change in higher education – including quality assurance. He has published widely on these topics in a range of journals and book series.
When we think about student politics, it is inevitable that the images of student protest and rebellion come to mind. These views of what counts as student politics have been shaped by rather romantic ideals of what it meant to be a student and do politics in 1960s, or perhaps even in 2010-2011 when we witnessed the last large scale student rebellion in England, but also more globally. When we stretch our imagination, perhaps we can also see students engaging with electoral politics, and them being stereotypically more left leaning compared to the general population – or ‘woke’ as portrayed by many right-wing media outlets today. In cases where students do not meet these expectations of political activity, they are often derogatively called ‘snowflakes’: a fragile generation of apolitical students. While there may be some truth in students becoming less politically active, it is important to question why this might be the case, but also to consider the extent to which our own understandings of student politics are perhaps outdated and need changing.
The cost of student protest
In contexts where higher education is marketed as an investment into one’s future, the student-as-consumer positioning becomes unavoidable. Consumerism in our universities may be brutally explicit as in the UK where students are protected by the Consumer Rights Act 2015, or more subtle in systems where laws and regulations do not treat students as consumers, but the transactional idea of higher education and human capital development still imply similar understandings. As students are constantly reminded to prioritise ‘value for money’ and question their investment into successful graduate employment, deviating from such a mindset and standing out as a disruptive or disobedient student cannot be a preferred or safe option. This was evident with the recent pro-Palestinian encampments which on British campuses were rather short-lived, often adopted around the exam periods and ending with the closure of the academic year 2023/2024. The cost of non-compliance is very high for our students: how could a student who has accumulated an average of £45k student debt with already insecure graduate employment trajectory drop everything and revolt? My recent book Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights deals with these dilemmas and argues that the modes of student politics have had to change alongside the generational pressures that contemporary students face. In other words, the form that student politics takes is intertwined with what it means to be a student today.
Alternative forms of political agency
To counteract the view that students have become apolitical or snowflakes, we need to imagine student politics as more fluid and situational: something that gets embedded within the everyday practices of being a student.
First, this revisioning invites us to be more open-minded about what counts as student protest. For example, it is evident that when today’s students do protest, their actions tend to be more short-lived while triggered by identity-based issues that matter to them personally. We should also look at the new and alternative spaces that activism takes place within, eg digital platforms. The latter could of course relate to generational shifts and students being more digitally adept, but also to the fact that the university campuses have become heavily regulated by timetabling pressures and health and safety rules, making it difficult for students to socialise, let alone organise on campus.
Second, our universities have never emphasised student voice as much as they do today. In addition to students’ unions, there is a wide range of new representative roles on university committees and working groups. While there are questions about tokenism and the effectiveness of these roles – and perhaps fairly so – one cannot deny that there is an incredible infrastructure emerging for students to (peacefully) exercise their interest. This could also be politically motivated, and we should not underestimate the power that students as collectives hold through such representative roles.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, I invite us to consider the power that the student-as-consumer holds. In the age of marketised universities, we need to ask some uncomfortable questions related to the extent to which student-as-consumer positioning itself empowers students with new types of political agency. We know that an increasing number of students are exercising their right to complain, and they often do this to call out universities for their wrongdoings. These wrongdoings may relate to consumer rights and personal grievances, but often they also reflect wider structural inequalities. It could therefore be argued that consumer rights have granted students new tools to exercise their interest. There is a tendency for the sector to view student complaints as something negative and unreasonable, and none of us would want to be the subject of one. However, it is likely that if students are increasingly treated as consumers, it is also this consumer positioning that offers new opportunities for political agency to be exercised. In today’s highly pressurised university environments, consumer complaints might be a more effective way to make oneself heard: making complaints is a legal right for our students, and the potential reputational damage to universities makes complaints high stakes.
In summary, I argue that the market forces and consumerist discourses that brutally shape students are also what trigger, enable and disable certain new and altered forms of political agency. Such understanding invites us to shift away from the prevailing assumption that contemporary students are becoming apolitical and instead to rethink our normative understanding of what counts as political agency.
Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge
Rille Raaper is Associate Professor at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism.
“…problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, para 38 (original emphasis)
The paradigm shift of students to customers at the heart of higher
education has changed strategies, psychological self-images, business models
and much else. But are the claims for and against students as customers (SAC)
and the related research as useful, insightful and angst ridden as we may at
first think? There are alarms about
changing student behaviours and approaches to learning and the relationship
towards academic staff but does the naming ‘customers’ reveal what were already
underlying, long standing problems? Does the concentrated focus on SAC obscure rather
than reveal?
One aspect of SAC is the observation that academic performance
declines, and learning becomes more surface and instrumental (Bunce, 2017).
Another is that SAC inclines students to be narcissist and aggressive, with HEI
management pandering to the demands of both students and their feedback on the
NSS, with other strategies to create iconic campus buildings, to maintain or
improve league table position (Nixon, 2018).
This raises some methodological questions on (a) the research on
academic performance and the degree of narcissism/aggression prior to SAC (ie around 1997 with the Dearing Report); (b) the scope and range of
the research given the scale of student numbers, participation rates, the
variety of student motivations, the nature of disciplines and their own
learning strategies, and the hierarchy of institutions; and (c) the combination
of (a) and (b) in the further question whether SAC changed the outlook of students to their education – or is it that
we are paying more attention and making different interpretations?
Some argue that the mass system created in some way marketisation of
HE and the SAC with all its attendant problems of changing the pedagogic
relationship and cognitive approaches. Given Martin Trow’s definitions of
elite, mass and universal systems of HE*, the UK achieved a mass system by the
late 1980s to early 1990s with the rapid expansion of the polytechnics;
universities were slower to expand student numbers. This expansion was before
the introduction of the £1,000 top up fees of the Major government and the
£3,000 introduced by David Blunkett (Secretary of State for Education in the
new Blair government) immediately after the Dearing Report. It was after the
1997 election that the aspiration was for a universal
HE system with a 50% participation rate.
If a mass system of HE came about (in a ‘fit of forgetfulness’ ) by
1991 when did marketisation begin? Marketisation may be a name we give to a
practice or context which had existed previously but was tacit and culturally and
historically deeper, hidden from view. The unnamed hierarchy of institutions of
Oxbridge, Russell, polytechnics, HE colleges, FE colleges had powerful cultural
and socio-political foundations and was a market of sorts (high to low value
goods, access limited by social/cultural capital and price, etc). That hierarchy was not, however,
necessarily top-down: the impact of social benefit of the ‘lower orders’ in
that hierarchy would be significant in widening participation. The ‘higher
order’ existed (and exists) in an ossified form. And as entry was restricted,
the competition within the sector did not exist or did not present existential
threats. Such is the longue durée when trying to analyse marketisation and the
SAC.
The focus on marketisation should help us realise that over the long
term the unit of resource was drastically reduced; state funding was slowly and
then rapidly withdrawn to the point where the level of student enrolment was
critical to long term strategy. That meant not maintaining but increasing
student numbers when the potential pool of students would fluctuate – with the present demographic trough ending in 2021
or 2022. Marketisation can thus be separated to some extent from the cognitive
dissonance or other anxieties of the SAC. HEIs (with exceptions in the
long-established hierarchy) were driven by the external forces of the funding
regime to develop marketing strategies, branding and gaming feedback systems in
response to the competition for students and the creation of interest groups – Alliance,
Modern, et al. The enrolled students
were not the customers in the marketisation but the product or outcome of
successful management. The students change to customers as the focus is then on
results, employment and further study rates. Such is the split personality of institutional
management here.
Research on SAC in STEM courses has a noted inclination to surface
learning and the instrumentalism of ‘getting a good grade in order to get a
good job’, but this prompts further questions. I am not sure that this is an
increased inclination to surface learning, nor whether surface and deep are
uncritical norms we can readily employ. The HEAC definition of deep learning
has an element of ‘employability’ in the application of knowledge across
differing contexts and disciplines (Howie and Bagnall, 2012). A student in 2019
may face the imperative to get a ‘degree level’ job in order to pay back
student loans. This is rational related to the student loans regime and widening participation, meaning this
imperative is not universally applied given the differing socio-economic
backgrounds of all students.
(Note that the current loan system is highly regressive as a form of
‘graduate tax’.)
And were STEM students more inclined toward deep or surface learning
before they became SAC? Teaching and
assessment in STEM may have been poorand
may have encouraged surface level learning (eg
through weekly phase tests which were tardily assessed).
What is deep learning in civil engineering when faced with stress
testing concrete girders or in solving quarternion equations in mathematics: is
much of STEM actually knowing and processing algorithms? How is such learnable
content in STEM equivalent in some cognitive way to the deep learning in modern
languages, history, psychology et al?
This is not to suggest a hierarchy of disciplines but differences, deep
differences, between rules-based disciplines and the humanities.
Learning is complex and individualised, and responsive to, without
entirely determining, the curriculum and the forms of its delivery. In the
research on SAC the assumptions are that teaching and assessment delivery is both
relatively unproblematic and designed to encourage deep, non-instrumental
learning. Expectations of the curriculum delivery and assessment will vary
amongst students depending on personal background of schooling and parents, the
discipline and personal motivations and the expectations will often be
unrealistic. Consider why they are unrealistic – more than the narcissism of
being a customer. (There is a very wide range of varieties of customer: as a
customer of Network Rail I am more a supplicant than a narcissist.)
The alarm over the changes (?) to the students’ view of their learning
as SAC in STEM should be put in the context of the previously high drop-out
rate of STEM students (relatively higher than non-STEM) which could reach 30%
of a cohort. The causes of drop out were thoroughly examined by Mantz Yorke(Yorke and Longden, 2004), but as
regards the SAC issue here, STEM drop outs were explained by tutors as lack of the
right mathematical preparation. There is comparatively little research on the
motivations for students entering STEM courses before they became SAC; such research is not over the long term or longitudinal.
However, research on the typology of students with differing motivations for
learning (the academic, the social, the questioning student etc) ranged across
all courses, does exist (a 20 year survey by Liz Beatty, 2005). Is it possible that after widening
participation to the point of a universal system, motivations towards the
instrumental or utilitarian will become more prominent? And is there an
implication that an elite HE system pre-SAC was less instrumentalist, less
surface learning? The creation of PPE (first Oxford in 1921 then spreading
across the sector) was an attempt to produce a mandarin class, where career
ambition was designed into the academic disciplines. That is, ‘to get a good
job’ applies here too but it will be expressed in different, indirect and
elevated ways of public service.**
There are some anachronisms in the research on SAC. The acceptance of
SAC by management, by producing student charters and providing students places
on boards, committees and senior management meetings is not a direct result of students or management
considering students as customers. Indeed, it predates SAC by many years and
has its origins in the 1960s and 70s.
I am unlikely to get onto the board of Morrisons, but I could for the
Co-op – a discussion point on partnerships, co-producers, membership of a community
of learners. The struggle by students to get representation in management has taken
fifty years from the Wilson government Blue Paper Student Protest (1970) to today. It may have been a concession, but
student representation changed the nature of HEIs in the process, prior to SAC.
Student Charters appear to be mostly a coherent, user-friendly reduction of
lengthy academic and other regulations that no party can comprehend without
extensive lawyerly study. A number of HEIs produced charters before the SAC era
(late 1990s). And iconic university buildings have been significantly
attractive in the architectural profession a long time before SAC –
Birmingham’s aspiration to be an independent city state with its Venetian
architecture recalling St Mark’s Square under the supervision of Joseph
Chamberlain (1890s) or Jim Stirling’s post-modern Engineering faculty building
at Leicester (1963) etc (Cannandine 2002).
Students have complex legal identities and are a complex and often fissiparous
body. They are customers of catering, they are members of a guild or union, learners,
activists and campaigners, clients, tenants, volunteers, sometimes disciplined
as the accused, or the appellant, they adopt and create new identities
psychologically, culturally and sexually. The language of students as customers
creates a language game that excludes other concerns: the withdrawal of state
funding, the creation of an academic precariat, the purpose of HE for learning
and skills supply, an alienation from a community by the persuasive self-image
as atomised customer, how deep learning is a creature of disciplines and the changing job market, that
student-academic relations were problematic and now become formalised ‘complaints’.
Students are not the ‘other’ and they are much more than customers.
Phil Pilkington
is Chair of Middlesex University Students’ Union Board of Trustees, a former
CEO of Coventry University Students’ Union, an Honorary Teaching Fellow of
Coventry University and a contributor to WonkHE.
*Martin Trow
defined an elite, mass and universal systems of HE by participation rates of
10-20%, 20-30% and 40-50% respectively.
** Trevor
Pateman, The Poverty of PPE, Oxford, 1968; a pamphlet criticising the course by
a graduate; it is acknowledged that the curriculum, ‘designed to run the Raj in
1936’, has changed little since that critique. This document is a fragment of
another history of higher education worthy of recovery: of complaint and
dissatisfaction with teaching and there were others who developed the
‘alternative prospectus’ movement in the 1970s and 80s.
References
Beatty L,
Gibbs G, and Morgan A (2005) ‘Learning orientations and study contracts’, in Marton, F, Hounsell, D and
Entwistle, N, (eds) (2005) The Experience
of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education, 3rd
(Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching,
Learning and Assessment.
Bunce,
Louise (2017) ‘The student-as-consumer approach in HE and its effects on
academic performance’, Studies in Higher Education,
42(11): 1958-1978
Howie P and Bagnall R (2012) ‘A critique of
the deep and surface learning model’, Teaching
in Higher Education 18(4); they state the distinction of learning is
“imprecise conceptualisation, ambiguous language, circularity and a lack
of definition…”
Nixon, E, Scullion, R and Hearn, R (2018) ‘Her majesty the student:
marketised higher education and the narcissistic (dis)satisfaction of the
student consumer’, Studies in Higher
Education 43(6): 927-943
Cannandine, David (2004), The ‘Chamberlain Tradition’, in In Churchill’s Shadow, Oxford: Oxford
University Press; his biographical sketch of Joe Chamberlain shows his vision
of Birmingham as an alternative power base to London.
Yorke M and Longden B (2004) Retention
and student success in higher education, Maidenhead: SRHE/Open University
Press
When the present English tuition fee regime was being planned, there were plenty of voices from inside universities warning that it would change the nature of the relationship between students and their universities for the worse. Students would, it was feared, become customers, rather than junior partners in an academic enterprise. Indeed, this was what the Government’s 2011 White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System, seemed to look forward to: “Better informed students will take their custom to the places offering good value for money” (para 2.24) – in other words, they would, it was hoped, act like normal consumers. Has this happened? Continue reading →
