There are currently over 35 million students within Europe and yet, to date, we have no clear understanding of the extent to which understandings of ‘the student’ are shared across the continent. Thus, a central aim of this article is to investigate how the contemporary higher education student understands their own role, and the extent to which this differs both within nation-states and across them. This is significant in terms of implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions that are made about common understandings of ‘the student’ across Europe – underpinning, for example, initiatives to increase cross-border educational mobility and the wider development of a European Higher Education Area. Drawing on data from students across Europe – and particularly plasticine models participants made to represent their understanding of themselves as students – we argue that, in many cases, there is an important disconnect between the ways in which students are constructed within policy, and how they understand themselves. The models produced by participants typically foregrounded learning and hard work rather than more instrumental concerns commonly emphasised within policy. This brings into question assertions made in the academic literature that recent reforms have had a direct effect on the subjectivities of students, encouraging them to be more consumerist in their outlook. Nevertheless, we have also shown that student conceptualisations differ, to some extent, by nation-state, evident particularly in Spain and Poland, and by institution – most notably in England and Spain, which have the most vertically differentiated higher education systems. These differences suggest that, despite the ‘policy convergence’ manifest in the creation of a European Higher Education Area, understandings of what it means to be a student in Europe today remain contested.

欧洲目前有超过3500万学生，但到目前为止，我们对整个欧洲大陆对“学生”的理解程度尚不明确。因此，本文的主要目的是研究当代高等教育学生如何理解自己的角色，以及民族国家内部和国家之间差异的程度。就整个欧洲对“学生”的普遍理解所做出的隐性（有时是显性）假设而言，这非常重要-例如，旨在加强跨境教育流动性和欧洲高等教育区更广泛发展的举措的基础。利用来自欧洲各地学生的数据，尤其是参加者用来代表他们对自己作为学生的理解的橡皮泥模型，我们认为，在许多情况下，在政策范围内构建学生的方式与他们如何进行学习之间存在着重要的脱节。了解自己。参与者产生的模型通常着重学习和努力，而不是政策中通常强调的更多工具性关注。这引起了学术文献中的断言，即最近的改革直接影响了学生的主体性，并鼓励他们在观点上更加消费主义。尽管如此，我们还表明，学生概念的差异在某种程度上因民族国家而异，特别是在西班牙和波兰，按机构划分-最值得注意的是英格兰和西班牙，它们在纵向上差异最大的高等教育系统。这些差异表明，尽管在建立欧洲高等教育区时表现出“政策趋同”，但对于今天成为欧洲学生意味着什么的理解仍然存有争议。