The neoliberal paradigm in the education policy has signified that the education has begun to operate according to the principles of the market, the customers' needs and purchasing power. These changes in the international education policy are seen already by us also in Finland and in higher education. The students' alienation and external fastening on the studies and school-like performing which picture the collecting of performances which are important from the point of view of the working life has become partly university studies. The development is also seen in the attitude to the higher education and to the learning. That is why it is important to pay attention to the practices of universities which produce the enterprising operation and are seen as the students' more instrumental and performance attitude to the studying. (Apple 2001; Honkimäki 2001; Deleuze 2005; Vuorinen and Valkonen 2005; Koivula, Rinne and Niukko 2009.) The purpose of this study is to clarify what kind of conceptions students have about the university as a teaching-learning environment. The university can be examined from the point of view of the education policy and analyse learning as spending (Morley 2003; Clark 2004; Ball 2004; Baal and Yodell 2007; Koivula, Rinne and Niukko 2009). It can also be examined from a point of view of a learning environment and analyse learning either as an individual or to take place in the interaction (Arvaja, Salovaara, Häkkinen and Järvelä 2007; Volet, Summers and Thurman 2009.) Entwistle, McCune and Hounsell (2003) talk about a teaching-learning environment with which they mean all the factors which affect the learning of the student. At the widest, it contains the social, cultural and political context of the whole higher education. The following level covers both institutional (for example a university/a faculty/an institution) and discipline-specific (for example pedagogics) factors. In addition to these, the teaching-learning environment includes the planning and organising of the teaching, teaching and assessing course content, the relations of the students and staff and the students and their backgrounds and thoughts including their learning strategies, learning conceptions, and learning orientations. (Entwistle, McCune and Hounsell 2003; Entwistle and Peterson 2004.)

The research material consists of 81 students' writing in which they wrote a short story about what kind of teaching-learning environment the university according to their experience is or what kind of they would like it to be. The material was collected in the autumn of 2008 and 2009 at the first lecture time of the course which belongs to the advanced studies of the pedagogics. There were altogether 81 answers in 42 of which the present was examined and an ideal situation was described in 39. The length of the answers varied aside (A4) from ¼ to 1½ pages. The material was analysed qualitatively so that the answers were divided into different groups according to what kind of conceptions about the teaching-learning environment they represented. The analysis was continued by grouping the answers to four types of the university as a teaching-learning environment.

The students’ answers can be grouped to four types according to how they are placed on the dimensions: collaborative learning – individual learning and learning as spending – learning as learning. “Content ones” and “individual educational career trackers” were both placed from the identified types in the individual dimension but they separated from each other in their attitude to the learning. “Individual educational career trackers” saw the university as “a service department store of educational alternatives” and there the teaching to be given as a service which they spend in order to “perform” learning. “Content ones” manifested that the present university was the ideal one and the educational opportunities given by it were seen to enable their own, individual learning and development. For “students with larger view” the university studying appeared as a possibility of the cognitive development but in the learning also the communal relations and its support were extremely important to them. Also to “communal consumers” the social relations, support and the instruction culture of the university were especially important but it could characterise them as demanding, service conscious consumers and their ideal university to be “a communal service centre”.