This paper examines how higher education students are conceptualised in Spain, drawing on an analysis of policy and institutional narratives about such students, as well as on the perspectives of university staff and students themselves.

Sociological analyses of European higher education often tend to stress the similarities of trends across the continent. A number of these studies have argued that neoliberal imperatives and policies such as the Bologna Process have led to the increased marketisation and homogenisation of higher education systems and student experiences across Europe (Wright and Shore, 2017; Voegtle et al., 2011). Some scholars have even suggested that such policy reforms are attempting to ‘reverse engineer’ an Anglo-American model of higher education across the continent (Slaughter and Cantwell, 2012). It is often assumed that, under such conditions, students come to be viewed—and behave and see themselves—as consumers (Molesworth et al., 2009; Moutsios, 2013; Naidoo and Williams, 2005).

However, such assumptions about students have not been adequately investigated empirically. The small number of studies that have carried out an empirical investigation of what it means to be a student in the context of the rising marketisation of higher education have tended to focus on England (e.g. Brooks and Abrahams, 2018; Tomlinson, 2017; Nixon et al., 2018). As a result, there is very little empirically-grounded analysis of how higher education policy reforms and neoliberalisation, more generally, might be perceived and experienced as impacting higher education systems and the student experience within other European countries, particularly those with less marketised higher education systems.

Our paper will contribute to addressing this gap by presenting a case study of how higher education students are conceptualised in Spain. It will focus on two research questions: (i) to what extent (if at all) are Spanish higher education students viewed as being customers in a marketised higher education landscape?; and (ii) to what extent are policy and institutional understandings of students shared by higher education staff and students themselves? In doing so, we will explore an interesting paradox that we encountered in our data: on the one hand, policy and institutional narratives in Spain present the higher education system as being relatively unmarketised. On the other hand, the staff and students we interviewed presented the Spanish higher education system and the student experience as having been dramatically transformed by marketisation.

By bringing together an analysis of policy and institutional narratives with an exploration of the perspectives of staff and students, our research will contribute to scholarship which has argued that understanding how policy is enacted requires a focus on not just the perspectives and actions of policymakers, but also on how policy is understood and engaged with by the populations at which these policies are directed (Wright and Rheinhold, 2011; Ball, 2007; Nielsen, 2011). In addition, through discussing our findings in the context of patterns we observed in five other European countries—Denmark, England, Ireland, Germany and Poland—we will challenge the view that processes of marketisation and neoliberalisation enacted through various higher education policies have brought about a significant degree of homogenisation of higher education systems and student experiences across Europe (Voegtle et al., 2011).

This paper draws on data collected as part of the Eurostudents project, a five-year-long European Research Council-funded project aimed at examining constructions of higher education students in six European countries—Spain, Poland, England, Ireland, Denmark, and Germany. The primary focus, however, will be on the following data collected in Spain, by members of the Eurostudents team, between 2017 and 2018: interviews with five policymakers and an analysis of 16 relevant policy documents; interviews with 12 staff members; and 9 focus groups with a total of 55 students. Staff and students were sampled from the same three higher education institutions, which were chosen to represent some of the diversity of the country’s higher education sector: two public universities and one private university in different parts of the country. The staff and students in our sample also represented a range of disciplinary affiliations, from Sociology to Medicine. In our interviews with higher education staff and policymakers, and in focus groups with students, we first used an open-ended approach to data collection, asking respondents in a very general way about what it means to be a higher education student in contemporary Spain. In the student focus groups, this was preceded by an activity in which we asked participants to make plasticine models of how they thought about their own identity as students, and how they believed others saw them. In the second part of the interviews and focus groups, we then moved on to ask respondents about four specific understandings of students discussed frequently in the extant literature—students as consumers or customers, as political actors, as future workers, and as dedicated learners—and the extent to which they also saw students in this way. Interviews with policymakers and staff members were conducted in English, while the student focus groups were conducted in Spanish and translated to English prior to analysis. Data analysis was conducted using NVivo, drawing on both inductive and deductive approaches. Although our paper focuses primarily on the data described above, our analysis benefits from the fact that we also collected the same categories of data from five other European countries. Where relevant, we will draw brief comparisons between Spain and these other countries, in order to better explain our findings for Spain.

We illustrate how while public and institutional narratives in Spain did not construct higher education as being marketised, university staff and students—in contrast—described Spanish higher education students as having been transformed by marketisation into financial investors in their education, student-workers, and ‘customers’. Strikingly, staff and students in the other countries in our study did not discuss higher education as having been transformed by marketisation to the extent that they did in Spain, despite the fact that marketisation is more entrenched in the higher education systems of some of these countries (e.g. England, Denmark). We argue that the especially strong narratives of marketisation of higher education which we encountered among staff and students in Spain could be attributed to: (i) the manner in which the private cost of education is paid for by students and the financial support structures available to them; (ii) dissatisfaction with the quality of education and the labour market outcomes associated with a degree; and (iii) the fact that marketisation is relatively less firmly established in the Spanish higher education system and therefore less normalised. By exploring the extent to which staff and student understandings of what it means to be a higher education student in Spain correlate with policy and institutional understandings, our findings underscore the importance of not viewing countries as ‘coherent educational entities’ (Philips and Schweisfurth, 2014), and the danger of assuming that a country’s official narratives are representative of the experiences of those on the ground. Our findings broadly support scholarship that has pointed to a growing market-orientation of national higher education systems across Europe. However, through comparing Spain with the other countries in our study, we illustrate how the manner in which marketisation is seen as impacting student roles might be experienced, on the ground, very differently in different national contexts.

Ball S (2007) Big Policies/Small World. An Introduction to International Perspectives in Education Policy. In: Lingard B and Ozga J (eds) The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Education Policy and Politics, London: Routledge, pp. 36–47. Brooks, R., and Abrahams, J. (2018) Higher education students as consumers? Evidence from England In: Educational Choices, Aspirations and Transitions in Europe: Systemic, Institutional and Subjective Constraints. Routledge Research in International and Comparative Education . Molesworth, M., E. Nixon, and E. Scullion. (2009). “The Marketization of the University and the Transformation of the Student into Consumer.” Teaching in Higher Education 14 (3): 277–287 Moutsios, S. (2013) “The de-Europeanization of the university under the Bologna process.” Thesis Eleven, 119, 1, 22-46. Naidoo, R. and Williams, J. (2005). “The neoliberal regime in English higher education: charters, consumers and the erosion of the public good.” Critical Studies in Education, 56(2), 208-223 Nielsen, G. B. (2011). Peopling policy: on conflicting subjectivities of fee-paying students. In C. Shore, S. Wright & D. Però (Eds.), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (pp. 68-85). Oxford: Berghahn. Nixon, E., R. Scullion, and Hearn. R (2018). “Her Majesty the Student: Marketised Higher Education and the Narcisstic (Dis)Satisfactions of the Student-Consumer.” Studies in Higher Education, 43(6), 927-943. Philips, D. and Schweisfurth, M. (2014) Comparative and International Education London, Continuum. Slaughter, S. and Cantwell, B. (2012) “Transatlantic moves to the market: the United States and the European Union.” Higher Education, 63, 583-606. Tomlinson, M. (2017). “Students’ Perceptions of Themselves as ‘Consumers’ of Higher Education.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(4), 450-467. Voegtle, E., Knill, C. and Dobbins, M. (2011) To what extent does transnational communication drive cross-national policy convergence? The impact of the Bologna Process on domestic higher education policies, Higher Education, 61, 77-94. Wright, S., & Reinhold, S. (2011). ‘Studying through’: a strategy for studying political transformation. Or sex, lies and British politics. Policy worlds: Anthropology and the analysis of contemporary power, 86-104. Wright, S. and Shore, C. (2017) Death of the Public University?: Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.