Students in Higher Education Governance in Europe: Contrasts, commonalities and controversies

Abstract

This article provides a synthesizing overview of the roles of students in higher education governance in Europe. We first review the existing literature on student involvement in higher education governance in order to locate the contribution of this special issue of Tertiary Education and Management. Second, we summarize the key findings of the five articles on the selected European countries gathered in this issue. In the third part of the article, we outline the main commonalities and contrasts between the countries. Finally, we discuss the controversies surrounding student participation in higher education governance and their grounding in the competing visions of higher education.

Keywords:

• governance
• student experience
• higher education policy/development

Acknowledgements

The work of Petr Pabian was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, grant No. P404/11/0127; the work of Lenka Minksová was supported by the Research Programme of the Centre of Higher Education Studies No. MSM0023775201.