Transformational accounts of students’ undergraduate education are evoked by their engagement with knowledge

There are strong concerns about students perceiving their undergraduate education in instrumental, rather than transformational, ways. However, it is not clear whether seeing education instrumentally undermines students' capacity to see their education as transformational. Based on data from a 7-year longitudinal study of chemical engineering students from three countries, this article shows that all students focused on instrumental outcomes from education in their first year of study. However, by their final year, students tended to give instrumental accounts of what they had gained from their overall university experience and transformational accounts of what they had gained from studying their subject. This suggests that, depending on the context evoked, most students can describe instrumental or transformational relationships to their education. However, developing transformational accounts on their education appeared to be dependent on studying knowledge-rich degrees that supported them to engage with the world from the perspective of a particular body of knowledge. This raises serious questions about educational policies that imply that instrumental outcomes are the most important outcomes from students' educational experiences as such policies obscure the importance of transformational knowledge-focused relationships that change the way that students engage with the world.