Paradise lost or created? How higher-education staff perceive the impact of policy on students

Sazana Jayadeva, Rachel Brooks, Predrag Lazetic

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

This paper explores how university staff in Denmark, Germany, and England perceived higher education (HE) policy as impacting the experience of being a student in their respective countries. While, in each nation, different policy mechanisms were identified as having triggered transformations in the experience of being a student, the transformations themselves were described in a strikingly similar manner across all three countries: staff stressed that students had become more instrumental in their approach to learning; that the student experience had become more circumscribed; and that students were under greater stress. We analyse how staff’s narratives about the impact of policy on the experience of being a student were mediated by their own ideas about what constituted ‘good education’, which in turn were strongly rooted in national traditions. Furthermore, in each country, staff’s assessment of the impact of specific policies on HE differed sharply from those of policy actors. Our findings contribute to the scholarship on the marketisation of HE, through drawing attention to how the rationality underpinning policy does not determine how it is engaged with by key stakeholders on the ground, and by demonstrating how the neoliberalisation of HE can unfold in different formats, some more explicit than others.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)819-837
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of Education Policy
Volume37
Issue number5
Early online date22 Apr 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Apr 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank all those who kindly gave up their time to be interviewed or take part in a focus group. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their feedback, and to the European Research Council for awarding a Consolidator Grant to Rachel Brooks (681018_EUROSTUDENTS).

Keywords

  • Bologna Process
  • Europe
  • Higher education
  • marketisation
  • policy
  • students

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education

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