Overcoming the student representation-student partnership dichotomy: toward a political conception of the student voice

Two competing approaches dominate student leadership literature: student representation consisting of elected student governments, and student partnerships consisting of appointed students working closely with educational leaders. This article responds to critiques of student representation outlined in Matthews and Dollinger’s (Higher Education, 2022) article in Higher Education and reframes the student representation-student partnership dichotomy within the context of power relations in education systems. An interdisciplinary critique of student partnership approaches is provided to demonstrate that they inherently risk corruption, patronage, tokenism, and ageism, drawing from definitions and studies pertaining to these terms in political science and social psychology. Populism scholarship is applied to student representation contexts to illustrate how student representation in itself is not problematic but rather how it has been implemented, and that populism in student representation can be reduced through liberal democratic safeguards that improve effectiveness, equity, and inclusion. A case is made about the importance of students having structural power within education decision-making instead of relying on the informality some student partnership approaches support. A framework to measure student power is provided by adapting Roger Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation theory to higher education contexts, so all student voice approaches plus their hybrids and subtypes can be evaluated comparatively.