Approaching Students in Higher Education Governance: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue of Tertiary Education and Management dedicated to the positions and roles of students in higher education governance. Students are today recognized as being the "major stakeholder" in higher education, but their actual participation in governance has largely failed to attract the attention of scholars. The aim of this special issue is therefore to address this omission by providing research-based portraits of students' involvement in higher education governance in five European countries. In this introduction, we present our conceptual framework by outlining four models of higher education governance and introduce the five articles on the selected countries that constitute the core of this special issue.