Opinion
The recently-released 2026 UN Global Education Monitoring Report, Lead with Youth, surveyed student involvement in government decision-making worldwide and mentioned student unions fifty-six times.
Australia’s historically vibrant and well-funded student unions were mentioned zero times.
The report’s dedicated section on the Australian Universities Accord — a process in which student union representative involvement was substantial and consequential — reduced that involvement to “various stakeholders.”
Something has diminished the vibrant stature of Australian student representatives, and it isn’t Voluntary Student Unionism.
The Student Leadership ‘Market’
Maybe you have seen the signs of student leadership commodification. In its simplest form, it looks like clubs “hiring” committee members, the proliferation of club “directors” — of what, precisely, we are not sure — and presidents rebranding as “managing directors.”
However, they reflect a change in culture. A president serves the members and leads a team, whereas a director manages an institution. Of course, we have seen this change elsewhere in our universities, when Vice Chancellors changed from elected presidents of the university, to appointed CEO’s. The culture we are referring to, stems from the broader governmental transformation of universities into market-orientated institutions.
What we are witnessing is the emergence of ‘student leadership market’: a space in which leadership positions are no longer about collective representation and the public good, but more about standing out within a crowded field. What presents as ‘leadership development’ is actually personal branding — credential accumulation — rather than broader forms of civic, intellectual development. Leadership, in this sense, is a position to be marketed, rather than a process to be honed (Marginson, 2024). To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with talented student leaders building networks or documenting their achievements. Our issue is that the marketing of leadership positions precedes – and ultimately displaces – the leadership experience itself.
Student clubs are increasingly operating within this logic of differentiation, with inflated titles and stratified participations. Student clubs — the bedrock of the student community — have been touched by the invisible hand of the market.
The origins of that hand are quite visible. In the early 2000’s, the University of Adelaide became the one of the first Australian universities to appoint its own formal student ambassadors. Since then, the model has flowered across the sector. In the university context it selects rather than elects.
Not every student is the right fit; universities carefully choose students who can represent the institution with positivity, polish, and what marketing departments call authenticity and enthusiasm. Just as a commercial brand ambassadorship confers status, a university student ambassadorship can be a hot commodity for university status and mobility.
The problem arises — and it is a serious problem — when universities begin conflating, or even equating, student ambassadors with student leaders. That conflation undermines genuine student representation. We investigated thirteen university ambassador programs. All utilised the language of leadership: developing leadership abilities, leadership training, hands-on experience. Personal branding (such as CV benefits) was directly highlighted in eight programs. Yet all thirteen state that ambassadors represent the university.
Two universities directly equated ambassadors with elected student representatives, listing them on the same student voice page. Critically, in every program, the beneficiary of the “leadership” role was the individual student, not the student body. One university formally embedded its ambassador program within a “Student Leadership Model,” claiming that ambassadors are a “university and student body representative”, and simultaneously required to “uphold our Strategic Plan.”
When a university describes a selected, appointed, paid ambassador as both a “student body representative” and a person required to “uphold the institutional strategic plan,” it has not just blurred the lines between representation and brand marketing. It has structurally combined them. In a system increasingly organised around performance and institutional reputation, such roles are not accidental. They are functional. They produce a form of student voice that is intrinsically aligned with institutional objectives (Parker et al., 2024).
The selection criteria for a student ambassador are, in many respects, the exact opposite of the traits that make a good student representative: to call for change, to hold the university to account. Have you ever seen a student ambassador give a negative review of the university that appointed them?
The Institutional Equation of Ambassadors with Leaders
In our view, student ambassadorships are not student representative-or-leadership positions. They are university representative positions. To represent students, one needs a constituency. Ambassadors do not meet that definition. Without an independent support base, and without a student constituency that can remove them, an ambassador cannot represent students, no matter how sincerely they try.
Yet ambassadors — or their equivalents — have been used by universities as substitutes for elected student leaders. And we are not just talking about an Orientation Week panel; we are talking about university governance structures: decision-making bodies which are critical avenues for student leaders to challenge and contribute to positive change.
This is often operationalised through the language of “students as partners,” where students are positioned as collaborators in curriculum, governance, or institutional initiatives. There are, undeniably, productive and meaningful versions of such partnerships. However, as institutionalised practices, these arrangements frequently remain structured, handpicked, and ultimately governed by the university itself. Student ambassadors have been embedded in institutional initiatives ranging from curriculum design to strategic program delivery, contributing to projects aligned with university priorities rather than student mandates (Bell et al., 2020). What emerges is not democratic representation, but managed participation: involvement that is invited, curated, and exclusive.
“What emerges is not democratic representation, but managed participation: involvement that is invited, curated, and exclusive.”
We examined four universities to understand how ambassadors are embedded in governance structures. In one, ambassadors were placed within a committee whose own terms of reference describe it as a governance body that “provides strategic input,” “advocates for student needs by undertaking projects to improve the health and wellbeing of students across the university,” and “facilitates important two-way communication between students and staff.” These are the functions of an elected student representative — filled here by someone the university selected and can remove. Another university’s ambassador program promised participation in “working groups,” enabling ambassadors to “share student voice and co-design events through involvement in working groups,” with one program explicitly offering “student voice in the governance and operations of the Faculty.” In neither case were these ambassadors chosen by the students they were said to represent. They were chosen by the institution whose strategic objectives they were simultaneously required to advance.
The cultural shift is not subtle. This a substitution of convenience, where the student voice that reaches the table has been pre-selected to be palatable. How many ambassadors will table a report that criticises the institution, walk out of a meeting or organise a petition or rally?
An honest account
Before we defend what student representation should be, we owe an honest account of what it has sometimes been.
Traditional student politics has genuine flaws. Factional infighting has turned elections into exercises in branch-stacking rather than platforms for student welfare. Short tenures mean institutional knowledge evaporates with each election cycle, leaving incoming representatives to rediscover problems their predecessors had already identified and partly solved. The absence of strategic direction has produced organisations that are loud without being effective. The concentration of real power in permanent union staff, who outlast and often outmanoeuvre elected representatives, has in many instances made “student-led” organisations something of a fiction.
But the achievements are real and substantial. Welfare support, sexual harassment policies, equity scholarships, accessible campus infrastructure, stipend increases above the poverty line at 13 universities. These were won by elected student representatives who had a mandate, a constituency, and the independence to fight for something their university management did not want to give them. In our own work in 2025, elected postgraduate representatives were instrumental in securing the first dedicated postgraduate council seat at a Victorian university, a cross-sector governance agreement, a Senate recommendation on mandatory student representation, and research cited in a national policy report recommending a $16,000 PhD stipend increase. None of that was achievable by appointment.
The difference is accountability. An elected representative who fails their constituency loses their position. An ambassador who displeases the institution loses their ambassadorship. These are structurally opposite incentive structures producing structurally opposite behaviour.
Where do we go from here?
The solution is not a return to the worst of the old model. It is a recovery of the democratic values that made the best of it work.
Restoring trust requires two things. First, student organisations must govern themselves well enough to be taken seriously: reading a profit and loss statement, following proper financial governance, ensuring every student dollar is deployed in the interests of members. Second, and more importantly, they must advocate. A student organisation bogged down by its own internal bureaucracy, mirroring the university’s committee structure, is not a responsive advocacy body. It is a breeding ground for ambassador-like representatives who speak but are not heard, who push but are not felt.
The best student representatives are servant leaders on the ground, listening to their members, arming themselves with research and evidence, then using whatever seat at the table they have to advocate with conviction — and sometimes walking out when the meeting becomes analogous to a HR process. Grinding out win by win is the critical part. It is not about votes. It is about trust.
Government has a role. The Victorian and NSW Parliaments must legislate minimum standards for elected student representation on university governing bodies. Our Victorian Joint Reform Proposal, endorsed by over twenty organisations, calls for a minimum of two elected student members on university councils with Staff and Student Advisory Forums providing a standing channel into governance. This is not radical — since our joint proposal, La Trobe has committed to a second student on council, and the University of Melbourne has already done it. It is a common-sense floor.
Finally, universities should be honest about what their ambassador programs are for. There is nothing wrong with a well-run program that introduces prospective students to campus life. But it should not be presented as student representation or student leadership, funded from SSAF, or substituted for the democratic accountability that elected student bodies provide. When universities treat their ambassadors as their student voice, they are not listening to students. They are listening to themselves.
Jesse Gardner-Russell is National President of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations and a PhD candidate in ophthalmology at The University of Melbourne.
Richard Lee is CAPA National Vice-President and a PhD candidate in higher education at The University of Queensland.
Gemma Lucy Smart is the CAPA Board Chair and a PhD candidate in history and philosophy at The University of Sydney.
References
Bell, A., Barahona, S., Beg, G., Coulson, S., Eymont, R., Hartman, J., Hubble, T., Leung, N., McDonnell, M. A., Ni, J., Peseta, T., Sakhaee, E., & Uptin, J. (2020). Students and academics working in partnership to embed cultural competence as a graduate quality. In J. Frawley, S. Larkin, & J. A. Smith (Eds.), Cultural competence and the higher education sector (pp. 233–252). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5362-2_13
Marginson, S. (2024). Student self-formation: An emerging paradigm in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 49(4), 748–762. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2023.2252826
Parker, L. D., Guthrie, J., & Martin-Sardesai, A. (2024). Performance management in the Australian higher education system: A historically informed critique. Accounting History, 29(2), 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1177/10323732241230348
Universities examined for desktop review: University of Sydney, University of Melbourne (FBE, Engineering, MSD), University of Western Australia, Victoria University, University of South Australia, Curtin University, University of Queensland, University of Tasmania, University of the Sunshine Coast, Swinburne University, JCU, ANU, RMIT, and Deakin.
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