The quality of higher education has been gaining attention around the world, especially in view of “massification” and the rising cost of higher education. Massification, marketization and demands for accountability have brought student experience to the centre of quality assurance policies and practices in higher education. Accordingly, students’ influence on – and involvement in – university structures and processes towards quality enhancement have become a more noticeable trend. Taking the theory of student agency as the starting point (Klemenčič, 2015), this chapter conceptualizes student involvement in quality enhancement as a combination of students’ agentic possibilities for such involvement (‘power’) and student agentic orientations (‘will’). The proposed framework presents a shift from the traditional focus on how institutions can assure educational quality to how students can be co-responsible for and contribute to the wellbeing and advancement of their university. The underlying prescriptive message is that universities should develop institutional pathways for students’ involvement in university, along with cultivating students’ sense of collective belonging and collective university identity.
September 18, 2015