Problematic and damaged image of a university among Iranian students: The lived experience of Iranian students at universities

Abstract

The current paper tried to explore the lived experience of Iranian students at universities in recent years after commercialization and commodification of higher education followed by limitations on the public and governmental resources of the universities. Thus, a university student is reduced to a customer position. The aim of this research is to study the lived experience of students in an old comprehensive university in the capital of Iran. Since the goal of the researchers was to go near the students themselves to reveal the lived and perceived experiences of them with the interpretive paradigm as a methodology. The hermeneutic phenomenological research method was chosen with deep exploratory interviews as a data gathering tool. Deep exploratory interviews were fulfilled with a purposive sample of 25 university students on the data saturation basis. 250 main propositions were found from these interviews. The most important propositions extracted with the thematic analysis method showed that just 30 percent of experiences were positive but 70 percent of them were negative.