‘The student experience’ is a formulation that will be familiar to many reading this article; increasingly the term has come to stand in for an imprecise set of values and practices around higher education study. Despite the fuzziness that characterises its use, ‘student experience talk’ has gained traction in education policy and rankings, academic research, and amongst students themselves. After initially drawing from Raymond Williams to situate ‘the student experience’ as a keyword across policy, marketing and educational domains, we analyse contemporary usage of the term in: (1) students’ own accounts of their engagements with the city in which they study; and (2) academic social science. A membership category when used by undergraduate students, the term serves to obfuscate a market logic in which achieving the student experience is an aspirational endeavour linking disparate place-based consumption practices in their university city. Drawing on the Bourdieusian distinction between categories of practice and categories of analysis, we argue that the contemporary deployment of ‘the student experience’ across popular and policy spaces does not mean that academics should import it uncritically into their analysis. On the contrary: the reification of this category of practice is precisely what has enabled the scramble for its attainment and management. Rather than allowing the embedding and normalisation of terms such as ‘the student experience’, the role of critical social science should be to unpack these muddled categories to avoid calling into being and reproducing what they seem to only describe.

中文翻译：

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“学生体验”与当代学生时代的重塑：批判性干预

“学生体验”是许多阅读本文的人都会熟悉的表述；这个词越来越多地代表围绕高等教育研究的一套不精确的价值观和实践。尽管它的使用具有模糊性，“学生体验谈话”已经在教育政策和排名、学术研究以及学生之间获得了吸引力。在最初借鉴 Raymond Williams 将“学生体验”作为跨政策、营销和教育领域的关键词之后，我们分析了该术语在以下方面的当代用法：(1) 学生对他们与所在城市的交往的描述; (2) 学术社会科学。本科生使用的会员类别，这个词混淆了一种市场逻辑，在这种逻辑中，实现学生体验是一种将大学城中不同的地方消费实践联系起来的有抱负的努力。借鉴布迪厄斯对实践类别和分析类别的区分，我们认为当代“学生体验”在流行和政策空间中的部署并不意味着学术界应该不加批判地将其引入他们的分析中。恰恰相反：这一类实践的具体化正是促成了对其实现和管理的争夺。而不是允许诸如“学生体验”之类的术语的嵌入和规范化，