Beyond the dichotomy of students-as-consumers and personal transformation: what students want from their degrees and their engagement with knowledge

ABSTRACT

There is widespread concern that students are increasingly becoming passive consumers of education who primarily attend university to obtain the credentials they need for the labour market. To interrogate this view, a longitudinal qualitative study examined what 47 students in three countries wanted to get out of studying for their degree (their personal projects) and how these developed over the course of their undergraduate studies. Our analysis showed that whilst most students had instrumental reasons for studying, they tended to be personally committed to the knowledge they were studying and had a clear sense of the role it would play in their future lives. Where students did not see knowledge as having a key role in helping them to realise their personal projects, they were less likely to value their studies. Also, students who were committed to the knowledge they were studying but did not have a sense of what they were trying to achieve personally with it, appeared to be uncertain about where they were going by the end of their degree. Based on this analysis, we argue that the dichotomy between students-as-consumers and personal transformation is false. Rather what is important is students being clear about how academic knowledge connects them to the world and helps them to shape their plans for the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Chemistry
• knowledge
• personal projects
• personal transformation
• student-as-consumer
• students

Introduction

Debates on the purposes of higher education from the perspective of students have increasingly focused on the extent to which students have become instrumental consumers focused on gaining credentials rather than engaging personally with knowledge (for example see, Brooks 2018; Molesworth, Nixon, and Scullion 2009; Naidoo and Jamieson 2005; Neary and Winn 2009). Whilst some have challenged the notion of ‘student-as-consumer’ for being too limited and crude a characterisation of students’ experiences of higher education (Budd 2017; Tight 2013), there is empirical evidence that students perceive themselves as consumers (Saunders 2015) and that it has a negative impact on the quality of their engagement with their education (Brooks and Abrahams 2018; Finney and Finney 2010; Nixon, Scullion, and Hearn 2018; Tomlinson 2017) leading to lower levels of academic performance (Bunce and Bennett 2021; Bunce, Baird, and Jones 2017).

Rather than rejecting the notion of student-as-consumer, in this article, we argue that it needs to be more precisely applied to particular aspects of students’ experiences. Current debates tend to be framed as if students have a single relationship with their education in which they are either positioned as consumers or are not. However, students have a number of different relationships with their education. For example, in relation to student engagement, Ashwin and McVitty (2015) highlight students’ relationships with their institutions, their courses of study and the knowledge they are studying. This is important because it is possible that students are positioned as consumers in some of these relationships but not others. Some support for this idea is offered by Taylor Bunce, Rathbone, and King (2023) who found, in a survey of over 750 UK students, that over 90% of students with a strong consumer identity also had a strong learner identity.

The kind of consumer relationship students have matters in educational terms. A consumer relationship to their course would mean that students are focused on the credentials they gain from studying (Tomlinson and Watermeyer 2022), whereas a consumer relationship to knowledge would mean that students were only focused on using knowledge without personal engagement with, and commitment to, this knowledge (Bernstein 2000; Naidoo and Jamieson 2005). If students have a single consumer relationship to their education, this would mean that an instrumental focus on the credentials they gain would undermine the personal relationship and commitment that students develop to structured bodies of knowledge. As this personal relationship to knowledge is central to the transformative power of higher education (Ashwin 2020), this would position personal transformation and student-as-consumer as dichotomous. However, if students can have a consumer relationship with their course but still have a personal engagement and commitment to the knowledge they are studying then this would mean that a consumer relationship does not necessarily undermine the transformative power of their education.

The central question raised in this debate is the relationship between what students want to get out of higher education and their engagement with academic knowledge. In order to examine the extent to which the notion of student-as-consumer has impacted students’ relationships to knowledge, an approach is needed that supports an exploration of students’ personal objectives for studying and their views of academic knowledge. There is also a need to take account of the potentially dynamic nature of students’ interests in their degrees and how these can shift over time and between contexts (Akkerman and Bakker 2019). To gain a sense of this dynamic relationship, there is a need to be able to conceptually separate what students want to get from studying for a degree from their engagement with academic knowledge.

Some approaches taken to examining what students want to get out of studying for a degree treat students’ view of academic knowledge as an element of their personal objectives rather than as a separate factor. For example, research into students’ orientations to university (for example, Beaty, Gibbs, and Morgan 1997; Brint 2012; Clark and Trow 1966; Meier 1970; Spronken-Smith et al. 2015; Willner, Lipshits-Braziler, and Gati 2020), tend to see students’ attitude to academic knowledge as being defined by their reasons for studying. This means that developing a relationship to academic knowledge is seen as one of a number of possible orientations to higher education with students who are interested in intellectual development being the ones who are focused on academic knowledge (for example, see Willner, Lipshits-Braziler, and Gati 2020).

More recent studies of how students understand the purposes of their engagement with higher education have not included a focus on academic knowledge as a particular orientation instead focusing on purposes such as preparation for work, personal growth and contributing to society (Ashby-King and Anderson 2022; Brooks et al. 2022; Budd 2017; Case et al. 2018; Muddiman 2020). In common with research into students’ socialisation into college (Weidman 1979; 2020) and research that has examined how higher education informs students’ career planning (Jackson and Tomlinson 2020; Tomlinson 2007), these studies tend to involve students from a mixture of disciplines. Rather than providing an insight into the different relationships that students develop between their personal objectives and the same bodies of academic knowledge, these studies provide insights into the different personal objectives that relate to students’ engagement with different bodies of knowledge. For example, Muddiman (2020) contrasts the different orientations to higher education of business and sociology students. This means that, due to the methodological design, these studies cannot give an insight into the relationship between the particular subjects students are studying and their understanding of what they hope to gain from engaging in higher education.

In addressing the conceptual challenge, we drew on Dubet’s (2000) approach to understanding student engagement with higher education. This focuses on three dimensions of student experience (Ashwin and Komljenovic 2018; Ashwin, Abbas, and McLean 2016; Dubet 2000; Jary and Lebeau 2009): ‘Personal projects’, which reflect students’ view of the value and usefulness of what they are studying; students’ level of social integration into university life; and students’ level of intellectual engagement with their studies. This separates what students want to get out of university from their intellectual engagement with their studies and supports a separate consideration of why students go to university, how students relate to their institutions, and how students relate to the academic knowledge that they encounter. It also supports a consideration of how these three elements impact on each other. In this article, we particularly focus on the relationship between students’ personal projects (why they go to university) and the view of knowledge generated through their intellectual engagement.

In addressing the methodological challenge, we focus on a single subject area of chemistry and subjects related to chemistry in order to show how these relations play out in a single subject area. This subject is relevant as there is some evidence that students studying STEM subjects are more likely to adopt consumerist perspectives on their education than students from other subjects (Bunce, Baird, and Jones 2017), although chemistry graduates have been found to have lower salary returns than students from other STEM subjects (Britton et al. 2022).

Research design

This article draws on data from a project examining students studying undergraduate degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering in two universities in England, two in South Africa and two in the USA. The methodology of this project owes a considerable debt to a previous project examining sociology (see McLean, Abbas, and Ashwin 2018). This article reports on data from the longitudinal study of chemistry students tracked through their undergraduate degrees in the three countries.

All institutions and participants were anonymised in line with the ethical approval granted by the lead institution in the research (Reference Number FL15035). Ethical approval was also obtained as required at each of the research sites. The universities in this research were given pseudonyms based on chemical elements to protect anonymity. These were:

• England – Erbium University and Europium University

• South Africa – Samarium University and Sodium University

• USA – Argon University and Astatine University.

Within each country, we attempted to cover the diversity of universities that offered Chemistry and Chemical Engineering degrees by including universities with different primary focuses in their missions (Guzmán-Valenzuela 2018). The missions of Erbium, Sodium and Argon primarily focused on the advancement of knowledge with a secondary focus on social transformation. Samarium’s missions primarily focused on social transformation with a secondary focus on knowledge transformation. Europium and Astatine’s missions focused on social transformation and preparing students for employment.

The data for this article were drawn from a self-selecting sample of 61 (24 England, 19 South Africa, 18 USA) students that reflected the diversity of the degree programmes in terms of ethnicity and gender. We interviewed students in each of the three or four years of their undergraduate degree. We have only included students in the analysis for this article if they had completed an interview in their final year of studies and at least one interview in their first and second years. This reduced the sample from 61 to 47 students who had sufficient data to be included in the analysis for this article, 21 from England, 15 from South Africa, 11 from the USA. Students were given pseudonyms reflecting the cultural diversity of the cohorts.

The students were drawn from a variety of courses that involved the study of chemistry. To maintain the anonymity of our institutions, we summarise these as either ‘chemistry’, in which students were studying single degrees in chemistry and ‘chemistry in combination with other subject(s)’, which includes joint degrees in chemistry, degrees in biochemistry, and degrees that involved a combination of sciences including chemistry. Some students changed their degree during their time at university. Table 1 shows the degrees that students were studying in the first year of their degrees and we use these initial degree programmes when providing quotes from individual students in the outcomes section. We do this because we were interested in students’ starting points in their degrees and how these played through in the development of their personal projects.

Table 1. The broad subjects of students’ degrees in the six universities at the start of their studies.

Institution	Chemistry	Chemistry in combination with other subjects	Total
Argon (USA)	3	1	4
Astatine (USA)	2	5	7
Erbium (England)	5	6	11
Europium (England)	10	0	10
Samarium (South Africa)	2	5	7
Sodium (South Africa)	0	8	8
	22	25	47

It is important to note that the US, South African and English Chemistry degrees had slightly different structures. Due to the earlier specialization in the English education system, the curriculum in the first year in the English chemistry degrees had more in common with the second year of the South African and US degrees.

The semi-structured interviews with the students lasted between 60 and 90 min. They followed a common protocol with questions covering students’ background, route into university, study practices, understanding of disciplinary knowledge, assessment experiences, wider university experiences, views on diversity and future aspirations (see supplementary file for the protocol). In the interviews, students were asked about why they had chosen to study chemistry, what they saw themselves doing in five years’ time and what they wanted to get out of studying for a degree. Although the analysis drew on the full interview transcripts, it was in response to these questions that students particularly focused on outlining what they wanted to get out of their degrees and the role of chemistry knowledge in achieving this.

Data analysis

We analysed our interview data by focusing on the primary outcome students reported wanting to gain from their university degree. As with the analysis of personal projects in Ashwin, Abbas, and McLean (2016), we initially adopted a phenomenographic approach (Marton and Booth 1997) to analysing students’ personal projects. Phenomenography is a way of analysing data that seeks to capture the variation in the way that a group of people experience a phenomenon. Rather than applying theory to the data or using a priori categories to structure the analysis, a phenomenographic approach seeks to establish all the different ways of seeing that phenomenon that are expressed in the data and to place them in a logical and inclusive hierarchical structure (Åkerlind 2005; Marton and Booth 1997). All authors of the paper worked on the analysis, which was focused on the qualitative variation in what students wanted to gain by studying for a degree. Initially, we worked individually to identify all of the different personal objectives that students had for studying. However, when we came to examine the logical relations between the categories, it became clear that they did not form an inclusive hierarchy that is usually generated through phenomenographic analysis (Åkerlind 2005; Marton and Booth 1997). Thus whilst we took a phenomenographic approach to working with our data, it did not result in a phenomenographic outcome space. This appeared to be because when focusing on what they wanted to gain from their degrees, students were focused on different phenomena rather than having differing perceptions of the same phenomenon. In conducting the analysis, we examined what students wanted to get out of studying at university in each year of their degree. We were particularly interested in the extent to which what students wanted to get out of university became more elaborated over each year of their degree. By ‘more elaborated’, we mean more defined and populated as an overall project with a greater sense of what it would actually involve.

In reporting the outcomes, we give an insight into both the structure of the outcomes, by the use of simple numerical counts, and the meaning of the outcomes, by the use of quotations from individual students. This approach is taken to show that we have not simply ‘cherry-picked’ quotations that support our argument.

In the outcomes section we discuss what students wanted to get out of their degree in terms of their ‘personal projects’. It is important to be explicit that this involved us as a group of researchers applying Dubet’s (2000) terminology to what students wanted to get out of studying at University and that students did not discuss their experiences in terms of ‘personal projects’.

Outcomes of analysis of the trajectories of personal projects

In examining the personal projects that students expressed the primary outcome they were pursuing through their engagement with higher education, our analysis of the data generated two broad projects: personal projects that were future career-focused and personal projects that were education-focused.

Table 2 shows the broad focus and personal projects of the students and the extent they became elaborated over the time students were studying for their degrees. A quarter of the students had personal projects that were focused on their education. There were two kinds of these projects. Six of the students had personal projects in which they saw their degree as a form of personal development that would support them in working out what to do next. Four of these six students elaborated their personal projects over time. Six of the students described their intentions in undertaking their degree in terms of following chemistry where it would lead them, four of these students elaborated their personal projects over time.

Table 2. The broad focus and personal projects of students at the start of their studies and whether these were elaborated over the course of their degrees.

Focus	Personal project	Elaborated over time	Not elaborated over time	Total
Education	To develop personally	4	2	6
	To follow the subject	4	2	6
Future career	To become a professional in the subject field	12	3	15
	To become a professional in a different field	7	2	9
	To go into business	5	6	11
Total		32	15	47

Nearly three quarters of the students had personal projects that were future career-focused. Fifteen of the students came to university with a clear sense that they were studying their subject, at least partly, as a way of developing a career as a professional in the area of their degree, whether in academia or in industry. Twelve of these students elaborated their personal projects over time. Nine of the students had a personal project focused on becoming another kind of professional whether in a branch of medicine or in teaching, and for seven of these students their personal projects were elaborated over time. Eleven of the students identified that their purpose in coming to university in their first year was to go into business. In contrast to those students who identified a particular profession that they wanted to work in, these students talked more generally about getting a degree in order to get a job or to make the contacts they needed to set up their own business. Five of these eleven students elaborated their personal projects over the course of their degrees.

Education-focused personal projects

There were two kinds of education-focused personal projects, one that was about students developing personally and the other was about following chemistry knowledge where it would take them.

Elaborated education-focused personal projects

The students with education focused personal projects that became more elaborated over time had a clear sense of how studying chemistry would support the achievement of their future plans. For example, Donna, whose personal project was about her personal development, was explicit about the role her degree played in what she wanted to do in the future:

You realise the things you can actually do with the knowledge that you know. You’re encouraged to think critically about things. You have to think about real world situations, applications. So I think in that way, it does prepare you for life beyond university. You’re going to be in all different types of scenarios, at work, and in your career. You’re going to be working on things which, right now, don’t exist. (Donna, Erbium, England, Chemistry in combination with other subject(s), Year 3).

Similarly, Holly, who saw her personal projects in terms of following chemistry, highlighted how it was her love of chemistry that led to her undertaking a degree:

I study chemistry because purely I just really like it … I think a lot of people go into fields just for the sake of it so if they’re influenced by their parents or influenced by money or anything like that. It’s the only thing that I really enjoy doing it … (Holly, Erbium, England, Chemistry, Year 1)

Holly’s sense of what she had gained from Chemistry at the end of degree again reflected this focus on following the subject:

I feel like I’ve gained an amount of knowledge that I am actually genuinely proud of. I feel like I am actually really understanding chemistry now and I can take that further into my work or whatever. (Holly, Erbium, England, Chemistry, Year 3).

Non-elaborated education-focused personal projects

In contrast where students did not have a sense of how studying chemistry would support their future plans, their personal projects did not become more elaborated over the course of their degrees. For example, Danny saw university as an opportunity to develop himself and, whilst he ended up studying for a PhD, he did not have a sense of where he would be heading in the longer term:

I think about the next year, maybe the next big decision that I make, so Master’s or PhD is the next decision I’m thinking of. Then I’ll have another three years to think about if I want to do post-doc? Do I want to go and do X, Y, or Z? I know it will then be a, not cushy job but I’ll be set for at least three years because of my contract. (Danny, Erbium, England, Chemistry in combination with other subject(s),, Year 3).

Similarly Demi, whose personal project was focused on following chemistry, did not seem to know where chemistry would take her by the end of her degree. Demi was clear that she saw herself as a researcher but mainly explained what she did not want to do:

I’m actually not sure what I’d like to do. I’d always thought a PhD but, as I’m coming towards the end of my studies, I think I’d like to get a job and have a break from studying for a bit. … . I’ve definitely decided I don’t want to do academia so much, so I think joining a company would be a better way. (Demi, Erbium, England, Chemistry, Year 3)

Overall most students with education-focused personal projects appeared to further elaborate their personal projects over the course of their degrees. However, for a small number of students, whilst they appeared committed to chemistry there was not a sense that they were able to use this to further elaborate their personal projects and they seemed uncertain about where they were going in the future.

Career-focused personal projects

There were three career-focused personal projects: becoming a professional in the area of chemistry, becoming a professional in another area and going into business.

Elaborated career-focused personal projects

The students with career-focused projects that became more elaborated over time had a clear sense of how studying chemistry would support their future plans. For example, Katie was interested in becoming a scientist and the meaning of this was more refined over the course of her degree. Whilst she was highly engaged with the knowledge of chemistry, there was much more of a sense of where this would take her and a clearer connection between the knowledge of chemistry and the world than for the students whose personal projects were focused on following chemistry:

I’ve kind of always enjoyed education, especially in the concepts that I like, especially like math and sciences. I have a view of myself, my future goal is to be a scientist and work in a laboratory. (Katie, Astatine, USA, Chemistry, Year 1)

Well after I finish my degree I want to go and get a PhD in analytical chemistry … I’m taking more knowledge and a better understanding of chemistry so I can go out in the real world and do a job and work in the chemical field (Katie, Astatine, USA, Chemistry, Year 3).

Similarly, Samantha was clear from her first year that she wanted to be a teacher and discussed this in each of her interviews. What was clear from her interviews was that her understanding of chemistry was central to the kind of teacher she wanted to become:

If I’ve had practical experience more than just the lab in university but also in the work field I feel like I’ll be a better teacher because I’ll really understand things more and be able to explain to the students more. My goal with my degree is if I ever do become a teacher like I want to, I had a brilliant teacher and she was that good that she inspired me to study science and I want to be that. (Samantha, Sodium, South Africa, Chemistry in combination with other subject(s), Year 2).

The students whose personal projects were focused on going into business were the least likely to appear to elaborate their personal projects over the course of their degree. This seemed to be because they were initially not focused on what the role the knowledge from their degree might play in their future lives . However, five of the 11 students seemed to be ‘captured’ by their subject and became clear about how their knowledge of chemistry played a key role in their personal project. For example, Minenhle originally wanted to study geology in order to enter the mining industry but over the course of his degree increasingly saw the relevance of the knowledge of chemistry to what he wanted to do:

The only reason I decided to really study was I really wanted to be a geologist from a young age. I didn’t really know why … But chemistry does get interesting, it makes sense … Sometimes you might be confused about some things, about why things happen, chemistry just comes in there and just explains it. (Minenhle, Samarium, South Africa, Chemistry in combination with other subject(s), Year 2).

Minenhle considered doing a PhD in chemistry in his third year before in his fourth year deciding that he wanted to use his scientific knowledge in business. It is interesting that Minenhle considered that it would be a waste if there was not a relationship between his future work and the knowledge of his degree.:

I hoped to gain what everyone hopes to gain, which is, one, a job. Be job secure. That’s what everyone wants to get. My other thing is to have gained knowledge, and then the knowledge that I have gained, or that I think I’ve gained, I hope that I will be able to use it and apply it somewhere else in the real world. Because otherwise it would have been a waste (Minenhle, Samarium, South Africa, Chemistry in combination with other subject(s), Year 4).

Non-elaborated career focused personal projects

For students with career-focused personal projects that did not become elaborated over the course of their degree, in all cases this appeared to be because there was not a relationship between their personal projects and their study of chemistry. There appeared to be two broad ways in which this happened, one was where students studied chemistry because of external pressures and the other was where students could not see where their knowledge of chemistry would take them.

In relation to external pressures, some students realised they were studying chemistry because of the expectations of others whereas other students were studying chemistry simply to gain access to a postgraduate degree. In relation to the first, Sivuyile came into his degree keen to make a contribution to the field of chemistry, but by the end of the degree became clear that this was not where his passion lay and decided to focus on music instead.

Basically it’s not that I hate chemistry … It’s just that it’s not my inherent passion. It doesn’t really come that naturally … I’ve always had music as a primary focus of my life. … It was like well they don’t really support this and my grades are decent enough for me to get into university, let me study and take it from there. I didn’t even have anything in mind. I remember I applied for [name of degree] and I didn’t even know what that was (Sivuyile, Sodium, South Africa,

Chemistry in combination with other subject(s)

, Year 4).

In contrast Ken studied chemistry to become a dentist. In his fourth year, he explained that he saw his degree as a ‘ticket’ into dental school and that he would have rather studied a different subject where the knowledge was more related to his interest in robotics:

At the end of it, I hoped a ticket into dental school to be honest’ … I've been doing robotics for eight years now. An’ I'm just like, what am I doing’ I've learned all these hand techniques, because I build a robot. There's a lot of techniques you learn and all these hand movements. And I understand and I love the sciences. So what can I do that fits both of those? It was dentistry.. [If I were to choose my course again] I would've actually been a Mechanical Engineer or a Computer Scientist. (Ken, Astatine, USA, Chemistry in combination with other subject(s), Year 4)

For both Sivuyile and Ken there was a strong sense that they did not value studying chemistry and by the end of their degrees they were glad to leave it behind and focus on other subjects.

For other students, whilst they expressed a love for chemistry, they could not see where the knowledge if offered would take them. For example, Chaaya initially studied chemistry because she enjoyed it and saw it as a route to getting a well-paid job. However, she increasingly could not connect the knowledge of chemistry to the world outside of university and this made her feel alienated from her educational environment.

I think it feels kind of like a dystopia here. I don't know how to describe it.’It's like you're stuck in a bubble … So it just feels like excluding a lot and just ignoring a lot during college and we just kind of focus on our own major instead of how we see the world and what the world is for us and what the world is.It's just overdone. College is weird. (Chaaya, Argon, USA, Chemistry, Year 3).

Overall across both the education and career-focused personal projects, students appeared to develop more elaborated personal projects where they had a sense of both where they wanted to do in the future and the role that chemistry knowledge played in supporting them to do this. Where students did not know where they wanted to go or could not connect chemistry to what they wanted to do in the world, there was either a lack of certainty about their personal project or a sense they had wasted their time in studying chemistry.

Discussion

The outcomes of this study highlight the need to move beyond the false dichotomy of students either engaging with higher education with a focus on personal transformation or a focus on themselves as student consumers. Most of the students were career-focussed, which could be taken as indicative of an instrumental, consumerist view of their course (Molesworth, Nixon, and Scullion 2009; Naidoo and Jamieson 2005; Neary and Winn 2009). However, two-thirds of the students with a career-focused personal project showed a personal commitment to the knowledge they were studying and a clear sense of the role that it would play in their future lives. Thus whilst they could be seen to take an instrumental view of their course, they did not take a consumerist view of knowledge.

When considering these findings in relation to previous work, three important considerations emerge. First, students seeing a relationship between their personal project and the knowledge of the degree they were studying appeared to be more important than the particular focus of students’ personal projects. In this context, it is notable that students whose personal projects were focused on going into business were the least likely to develop more elaborated personal projects over the course of their degrees. This seemed to be because the vagueness of this personal project made it difficult to connect it to the knowledge they were studying. Importantly where students were not clear about the role that academic knowledge played in their personal project, they appeared not to value their education and lacked a sense of where they were going. This suggests that a purely consumer relationship with knowledge could not support students in elaborating their personal projects or connecting this knowledge to the world beyond university. Thus those who seek to purely consume knowledge perhaps are destined to always end up as ‘thwarted consumers’ (Brooks 2018) because the mere consumption of knowledge does not give students what they need to relate the knowledge they are studying to the world. This suggestion could help to explain the negative impact that students perceiving themselves as consumers appears to have on their educational experiences and outcomes (Brooks and Abrahams 2018; Bunce and Bennett 2021; Bunce, Baird, and Jones 2017; Finney and Finney 2010; Nixon, Scullion, and Hearn 2018; Tomlinson 2017). The evidence from our study suggested that it was the consumer view of knowledge that led to students’ dissatisfaction with their course but it is also possible that where students are dissatisfied with their course that they are more likely to adopt a consumer relationship to knowledge.

Second, there appeared to be issues with students who studied ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ by following chemistry where it took them. Rather than the key distinction between instrumental or intrinsic commitments to education as implied by Bernstein (2000), it appeared to be whether students had both a sense of where they are going through their personal projects and a sense of how the knowledge they engage with through their degree will get them there. Where they just had a direction (for example, ‘going into business’) but did not know how this was related to chemistry, they did not express a sense of progress over the course of their degrees. Importantly, it was also the case that students who had an interest in chemistry knowledge but not a sense of where they were going with it, also did not develop more elaborated personal projects.

Third, this suggests that students’ attitudes and expectations of knowledge play a key role in shaping how they see their purposes and expectations in studying for a degree. Importantly, the knowledge of chemistry appeared to play a different role than sociological knowledge where students’ personal projects were more focused on changing themselves and the world than future careers (Ashwin, Abbas, and McLean 2016). This foregrounds the importance of understanding the particular roles played by knowledge from different disciplines and fields in informing students’ personal projects and the importance of contextual differences in understanding what students want to get out of their education (Akkerman and Bakker 2019). This highlights the importance of examining these issues in relation to particular subjects in contrast to those studies that compare and contrast different disciplines (Ashby-King and Anderson 2022; Brooks et al. 2022; Budd 2017; Case et al. 2018; Jackson and Tomlinson 2020; Muddiman 2020; Tomlinson 2007; Weidman 1979; 2020). Indeed if the personal projects of the chemistry students in this article were compared to those of the students in the sociology study (Ashwin, Abbas, and McLean 2016) then they would have appeared to be merely student consumers and their rich personal relationships to knowledge could have been obscured. This offers an explanation for studies that have found that STEM students tend to be more likely to see themselves as consumers (Bunce, Baird, and Jones 2017) and suggests it is important for future studies to have a rich understanding of students’ relations to knowledge in particular subjects before comparing their personal projects with students from other disciplines and fields.

As a whole, our findings emphasise the importance of university degrees being a space in which students come into contact with structured bodies of knowledge and explore how this knowledge connects to the world in ways that will shape their future lives (Ashwin 2020). This has important implications for how we understand the potential benefits of studying for a degree. Rather than simply seeing this in terms of the benefits of holding a credential (Tomlinson and Watermeyer 2022), it needs to be understood in terms of how students use the knowledge they engage with to connect to the world and shape their futures. This means that many of the benefits of a degree are dependent on students’ personal engagement with academic knowledge. In common with Taylor Bunce, Rathbone, and King (2023), this study highlights that students’ seeing themselves as consumers is not necessarily a barrier to their successful engagement with higher education providing they also understand they are engaged in an educational experience.

Inevitably, this study could only offer a limited view of these relations because it is based on a relatively small number of students studying in a small number of institutions in one subject area. There is a need for future research to explore these questions with a greater number of students from a greater number of disciplines and fields whilst always starting from a rich understanding of the relations between personal projects and knowledge within particular disciplines and fields.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we suggest that rather than seeing students’ engagement with higher education in terms of ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ or consumerist approaches to higher education, there is a need to understand how students make use of the knowledge that makes up their degrees in order to further elaborate their personal projects. This suggests that rather than emphasising the importance of getting a degree, it is important to emphasise how the knowledge students study in a degree connects to them to the world and helps them to achieve what they want to do in the future.

Acknowledgements

This article is from the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) Understanding Knowledge, Curriculum and Student Agency Project. We acknowledge the contribution of the other project team members: Margaret Blackie, Jenni Case, Jan McArthur, Nicole Pitterson, Janja Komljenovic, Kayleigh Rosewell, and Alaa Abdalla and the support of the Economic and Social Research Council and Research England (grant references: ES/M010082/1, ES/M010082/2 and ES/T014768/1) and National Research Foundation, South Africa (grant reference: 105856).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK and Research England under grant numbers: ES/M010082/1, ES/M010082/2 and ES/T014768/1 and by the National Research Foundation, South Africa under grant number: 105856.