Purpose: In today's global and highly competitive climate among universities, educational developers and instructors have focused more on trying to make the student experience more engaging. In this manner, student co-creation activities have recently become a major research priority in marketing and higher education (HE) research. The purpose of this study is to present a systematic review of the literature on student co-creation roles and behaviors in HE in order to map extant research on this topic and offer a consolidated view of the co-creation process and approaches that can be employed by HEIs to motivate students to co-create their HE experience. Design/methodology/approach: A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach was followed to classify, select, synthesize, analyze and assess the most relevant studies on student participation in co-creation in HE. Findings: This study's analysis has identified that the co-creation process in HE includes dialog, access, risk and transparency. The main approaches used by higher education institutions (HEIs) to motivate students to co-create their HE experience are student involvement, cognitive engagement, university affiliation and emotional engagement. Our review also shows that student co-creation behaviors are mainly participation and citizenship behavior, and their co-creation roles include those of co-producers, participants, change agents and partners. Originality/value: This systematic literature review analyses and critically discusses the state of the art in student co-creation roles in HE and the approaches HEIs use. By providing a map of existing research, the paper contributes both to the clarification of student co-creation roles and behaviors in HE and the identification of research gaps and opportunities for further research.