A Transactional or a Relational Contract? The Student-Consumer, Social Participation and Alumni Donations in Higher Education

ABSTRACTThe 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 the differentiation between psychological transactional contracts – where students who achieve better academic results are more likely to donate – and relational contracts – where students donate more following engagement in social experiences. Making use of longitudinal data on donation behaviour from over 50,000 alumni from an English university over two decades, we find that while students who get better degree outcomes are more likely to donate, the association between participation in social experiences and donations is much stronger. This questions prevalent transactional models of HE and underlines the limitations of purely consumerist views of the relation between students and higher education institutions, even in the marketized UK context.Keywords: higher educationalumnidonationsstudent-consumersocial participationUK 6. AcknowledgementThe authors would like to thank Andres Sandoval Hernandez for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are ours.7. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).8. Ethics StatementThis work is secondary analysis of de-identified institutional data. No new data collection took place, and ethical review and approval was not required.Data Availability StatementThe authors do not have institutional permission to share the data employed in the production of the article.Notes1 We thank reviewers for emphasising the importance of the role of solicitation, including through social media as mentioned later in the article.