Higher education (HE) has become a central site where the relations between democracy, pedagogy and technology are being reshaped through algorithmic infrastructures. In this context, a specific tension becomes visible: as educational processes become intertwined with systems of classification, prediction and optimization, recognition risks becoming conditional on data legibility, while pedagogical judgement is redirected toward procedural efficiency. Against this background, this article investigates how subjectivity, recognition and pedagogical responsibility can be conceptually framed when formative encounters are mediated through pedagogical practice as well as through algorithmic operations. To address this question, it develops the DEA model (Democratic Education under Algorithmic Conditions) as a reflexive, education–theoretical heuristic grounded in educational theory, subjectivation research, democratic thought and critical data studies. The model positions education, democracy and digitalisation as interdependent fields and specifies three analytical dimensions: formative, normative and inferential. These are elaborated through relational vectors and framing structures that include societal discourses, institutional configurations, cultural imaginaries and biographical conditions. The reconstruction shows how pedagogical responsibility becomes vulnerable to displacement by optimization routines, how recognition is reorganised by regimes of data legibility and how didactic relations are reconfigured through automated feedback and recommendation systems. Rather than prescribing technical solutions, the DEA model offers a conceptual orientation for tracing how algorithmic mediation redistributes recognition, responsibility and legitimacy in HE, and for sustaining Bildung and democratic subject formation under digital conditions.