Higher education has often been accused of its anti-social character, represented by the metaphor of the 'ivory tower'. However, the idea of the pursuit of knowledge per se, which is associated with the ivory tower, has not been widely recognized as a public ideal of higher education. In this study, by drawing on the 20th-century British…

The relationship between students and higher education is seen to have become increasingly transactional. We approach the study of the student-HE relationship in a novel way, by focusing on students' behaviour post-university, rather than on student narratives. Conceptually, the article builds on multidimensional views of student engagement and…