Different understandings of higher education: How students in Germany conceptualise the purpose and aims of higher education
Postdoc Gregor Schäfer has published the article “What is higher education to contemporary students in Germany?” in the journal Higher Education Quarterly.
The purpose, aim and goals of higher education itself have been discussed and researched in the context of massified and marketized higher education in Germany, with a focus mainly on higher education national policies or the view of faculty staff. By shifting the perspective instead to the students, this article asks what higher education means to them nowadays. Gregor Schäfer’s study is based on 95 interviews with German graduate students from three disciplines (business administration/management, medicine and musicology) and it offers a typology of what students understand as the purpose of higher education. Six types were reconstructed from the empirical material, along three main lines of higher education’s purpose (occupational, personal and societal). This paper also shows how the chosen discipline becomes more salient for the student’s perception of higher education purpose than their social background. This questions previous research that found strong ties between instrumentalism and social background in higher education. This findings also demonstrate that social differences do matter in their egalitarian or elitist variation of understanding within non-instrumentalist types and illustrate how heterogenous contemporary higher education purpose has become, which mirrors a further general differentiation in higher education.
Read the article (open access): https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12464