The symposium on New Public Management and standardisation in higher education in Europe will discuss the policy developments in the past decade in European higher education landscape. In particular, the attention will be paid to the extent and understandings of New Public Management in different countries’  policy discourses as well as in the evidence on the implications of the changes these reforms brought about in the respective systems. Intended and unintended policy effects and reasons behind the success or failure of the reforms will be addressed. The papers in the symposium build on extant public management  and higher education policy approaches, including governance models and policy implementation literature. In this regard, the case of Denmark will shed light on the most profound policy initiatives to foster goverance shifts in the Danish higher education.  The paper on the higher education reforms in Hungary will elaborate on the role of trust in the implementation of New Public Management reforms in Hungary, especially with the focus on the implementation failure of performance agreements and contracts in the Hungarian higher education. The paper on the Dutch higher education system will elaborate on the  intended and unintended effects of New Public Management on academic work roles and research productivity in the Dutch system. Finally, the Portguese contribution will elaborate on the link between the standardisation discourse in higher education poliicies in Portugal and graduate employability discourse. The papers use a variety of methods, such as document analysis, survey  and interview analysis. The four contributions will go beyond the state of the art of the New Public Management in higher education literature as they will provide the critical accounts of the successful or failed impacts of reforms on a range of core aspects in higher education:  academic performance, research productivity, graduated employability, and governance.

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