A Transactional Or A Relational Contract? The Student Consumer, Social Participation And Alumni Donations In Higher Education

ABSTRACT

The relationship between students and higher education is seen to have become increasingly transactional. We approach the study of the student–HE relationship in a novel way, by focusing on students’ behaviour post-university, rather than on student narratives. Conceptually, the article builds on multidimensional views of student engagement and the differentiation between psychological transactional contracts – where students who achieve better academic results are more likely to donate – and relational contracts – where students donate more following engagement in social experiences. Making use of longitudinal data on donation behaviour from over 50,000 alumni from an English university over two decades, we find that while students who get better degree outcomes are more likely to donate, the association between participation in social experiences and donations is much stronger. This questions prevalent transactional models of HE and underlines the limitations of purely consumerist views of the relation between students and higher education institutions, even in the marketized UK context.

Keywords:

• higher education
• alumni
• donations
• student-consumer
• social participation
• UK

6. Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Andres Sandoval Hernandez for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are ours.

7. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

8. Ethics Statement

This work is secondary analysis of de-identified institutional data. No new data collection took place, and ethical review and approval was not required.

Data Availability Statement

The authors do not have institutional permission to share the data employed in the production of the article.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We thank reviewers for emphasising the importance of the role of solicitation, including through social media as mentioned later in the article.