Are students as lucky to be here as they feel?

I’ve been thinking a lot this summer about rights and confidence.

As I’ve traversed the country delivering training to new SU officers, it’s been rare to hear of student leaders framing themselves as consumers.

But, as the Office for Students (OfS) notes in its consultation on a new condition of registration, they do talk about “fairness” and “honesty’” when they talk about unmet expectations.

New regulation on the nuts and bolts of promises, delivery and complaints may well help. A new single source of information on treating students fairly might help too.

But it was an international student who’d won their election that floored me.

Their journey from Bengaluru to Britain had been fraught with unfairness – outright lies on costs and housing from their agent, a huge and legally unjustifiable deposit, a late arrival and non-existent induction, thin provision marred by strikes, vast class sizes and pitiful support to find a placement.

Despite the myriad issues, she said she nevertheless felt “lucky to be here”.

And the problem with all of the proposals in C6? People who feel lucky to be here suck it up.

Never had it so good

This year, universities and colleges made 1.3 million offers to UK 18-year-olds – up from 1.2 million last year – and 99 per cent of those who applied by the January deadline went into results day holding at least one.

Meanwhile, on the Office for Students’ (OfS) most recent reckoning, 124 English providers – 45 per cent of those analysed – face a deficit in 2025–26 without mitigating action, and nearly one in six are projected to end the year with less than 30 days’ liquidity.

You’d never guess either number from the sector’s Clearing webpages.

At one university, applicants receiving a Clearing offer are invited to “secure your place and choose the reward that fits your student journey” – £500 off first-year accommodation, a £500 tech voucher, or a bundle of “entertainment, food deliveries, shopping perks and career boosting skills” – provided the offer is accepted within 48 hours.

Rewards are limited, allocated first-come first-served, and “all decisions are final”. The reward terminates if you withdraw, requires you to stay enrolled past the census point, and won’t be paid at all if you owe the university money. It’s less a gift, more a device designed to assure continuation. Or “trap you”, as students would call it.

Another’s Clearing FAQs explain that places are “limited” and “generally in high demand”, and that verbal offers are normally held open for 24 hours. One describes Clearing as a “final chance” before moving successful applicants briskly into “You’ve made it” messaging. Another pairs “limited places available on selected courses” with an invitation to “invest in your future”.

Each claim, taken alone, might have an innocent explanation. Taken together, in a cycle where 99 per cent of on-time UK 18-year-old applicants already held an offer and providers are fighting each other for every enrolment, the pattern is harder to explain innocently – a sector whose need for students has rarely been more obvious talks to applicants as though the favour flows the other way.

I’ve taken to calling it “lucky to be here” syndrome – the production of student gratitude and deference by presenting an essentially commercial and mutually dependent relationship as a scarce favour bestowed upon the student by the institution.

Clearing is just where the machinery is easiest to spot in August. The rest of it runs all year round, at every stage of the student lifecycle – and the closer you look, the more the bits represent a system.

Who needs whom

The signature move is a reversal of dependence.

Economically, a university in 2026 is a competing seller that may urgently need tuition income – that’s what the OfS deficit figures mean. Symbolically, it remains the selecting body.

So rather than thinking “this institution worked quite hard to persuade me to buy its provision”, the applicant thinks “this institution judged me worthy of admission” – a contingent power relationship made to feel natural, deserved and almost ceremonial.

And that framing isn’t just an aesthetic choice, because what starts as marketing compounds into something else:

scarce “place” = gift-like “scholarship” = deadline and deposit = offer-holder identity = financial and emotional sunk cost = choice-supportive defence = self-blame and reluctance to complain

The point is not just that universities exaggerate their own desirability – everyone knows that. It’s that prestige can operate as a system of accountability avoidance, cultivated hardest by the institutions that can least afford scrutiny of what the fee actually buys.

The scarcity claim is only the opening gambit, because between offer and enrolment there’s a whole wedge of material designed to convert an unevaluated purchase into an identity.

“Congratulations” arrive before the applicant has had any chance to weigh what they’re being congratulated for. Offer letters carry a vice chancellor’s signature while being sent automatically. Templated messages report that “we saw something special in your application”, and applicants get asked “why this university?” before the university has demonstrated why they should choose it.

One advertises “Exclusive Offer Holder Days” – with limited spaces, naturally, and a prompt to “secure your place now” – where the exclusivity consists of every single offer-holder being invited. Reminds me of the trip to the water park I “won” in Tenerife.

Then come the commitment devices. Offer-holder groups and introductions to “future classmates” build a social world it would now cost something to walk away from. Applicants are encouraged to announce the offer publicly, add the profile-picture frame, choose accommodation, join societies and buy the hoodie – each a small act that raises the emotional price of changing your mind, and each completed before a single seminar can be evaluated.

“Welcome to the family” arrives before a contract has even been formed. The same tricks now run at the retention end too – one page for students considering staying on to postgraduate study pairs an automatic 10 per cent discount with the reassurance “we already know you”.

Congratulations on your automatic scholarship

Think about the sullying of the word “scholarship”. One university offers a “guaranteed scholarship” of £5,000 to eligible self-funding international undergraduates – no competition involved beyond obtaining a place and enrolling.

Another automatically reduces the annual undergraduate fee from £16,000 to £9,790 for eligible students. A university’s Regional Scholarship is an automatic £5,000 off the first year for eligible nationalities, another advertises automatic £10,000 scholarships for postgraduates from Nigeria, and another’s “Global Gold” and “Global Silver” Excellence Scholarships operate as automatic fee discounts on a page that separately offers loyalty and prompt-payment reductions.

One university runs a Loyalty Scholarship – 20 per cent off the first year for eligible returning international students and alumni – alongside a Family Scholarship giving the same reduction to eligible children, grandchildren and siblings of students and alumni, a distinction conferred by kinship with an existing customer.

Another gives graduates, including former exchange students, an automatic 20 per cent “loyalty scholarship”. And a whole family of awards turns out to reward speed of payment rather than anything resembling merit – a £1,500 Early Confirmation Award for unconditional offer-holders who pay by a deadline, a £2,000 discount for international postgraduates who pay their deposit within ten days, an early-acceptance discount, and a £500 early-payment discount – filed, without apparent embarrassment, under “scholarships and waivers”.

The question is what changes when “you qualify for our current price” becomes “we have awarded you a scholarship”. The first framing supports consumer entitlement – you shopped, you compared, you got the going rate. The second creates recognition, gratitude and a relationship with a benefactor, and there’s evidence that the label alone can do purchasing work – scholarship framing shifting enrolment even where net prices were held roughly constant. A discount is something you negotiate. An award is something you live up to.

Top five of a list we compiled ourselves

Scarcity’s twin is prestige, and here at least there’s regulatory history to draw on.

In 2017 the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld complaints against six universities in one coordinated sweep. One university’s “Top 5 for student satisfaction” had been calculated against a self-selected set of “mainstream” English universities. Another’s “top 1% world university” came without a defensible denominator.

“London’s top modern university” never adequately defined “modern”. Another presented a “No.1 in the UK” physics claim as a REF result when REF ranked no such thing. One university’s “top university in England for long-term graduate prospects” implied more than the particular measure could bear.

ASA rulings aside, the everyday versions are legal and everywhere – whichever league table gives the highest position this year, institutional rank deployed as evidence about a particular course, research rankings offered as evidence of undergraduate teaching quality, Russell Group membership standing in for teaching evidence altogether, “award-winning university” where the award covered one building.

The function is the same as the scarcity claim. The applicant is invited to feel fortunate to be admitted somewhere so demonstrably excellent, on measures that mostly say nothing about what their experience will actually be like.

Then there’s the website’s favourite grammatical trick – the conditional. “Access to placements” can mean students must secure their own. “Placement opportunity” can mean permission to interrupt your studies should you happen to find one. “95 per cent in employment or further study” bundles two outcomes together because one of them is weaker alone, and the employers whose logos decorate a course page may have once attended a careers fair.

A related version inflates the ordinary into the exceptional – “access to academic experts” meaning scheduled teaching, “one-to-one support” meaning one meeting a term, “24/7 support” meaning recorded materials and a chatbot. And the actual valuable things – study abroad, incubators, mentoring schemes, specialist facilities, counselling – get advertised to everyone while being available, competitively, by lottery or via a waiting list, to a few. The words “may”, “can”, “opportunity to” and “access to” do a lot of work.

When it goes wrong, those words turn out to have been the contract. A postgraduate who picked a course largely for its industrial placement, and never got one, was offered half the tuition fee – and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) didn’t recommend more, because the published information had offered an “opportunity” rather than a guarantee.

In another case, a provider whose prospectus listed specialist equipment as available from year one – the student couldn’t use it until year three – responded to the complaint by describing its advertised industry access and employment opportunities as “additional services” it wasn’t obliged to deliver. The OIA pointed out that the marketing had made no such distinction, and recommended compensation and a consumer law review.

Independent learning and other savings

Once students are enrolled, the same translation service goes to work on provision itself – and I’ll try to be fair here, because at least some of what I’ve identified below can be perfectly good pedagogy, sincerely delivered. Independent learning is a real thing.

But watch what the language can conceal. Low contact hours become “independent learning” and fewer seminars “build autonomy”. Recorded lectures become “flexible learning” where nobody meaningfully chose flexibility. Merged cohorts become “interdisciplinary learning”, heavy reliance on hourly-paid and inexperienced teachers becomes “practitioner-led” or “near-peer” learning, staff turnover becomes “exposure to diverse perspectives”, delayed marking becomes “rigorous moderation” – and a course closure becomes “portfolio renewal”.

It’s not so much about whether the pedagogical description is flattering. It’s whether it conceals a resource decision the student never got to see, made after they’d already bought in and couldn’t cheaply leave.

Occasionally the curtain slips. In one OIA case concerning a distance-learning course that lacked promised practical content and suffered chronic staff unavailability, internal documents showed staff saying they could not support the number of students being recruited. The OIA upheld the complaint, required quality and marketing reviews, and informed OfS.

You get out what you put in

Then when a student notices the gap between the brochure and the provision, another vocab appears – partnership.

Student charters present symmetrical obligations between an individual teenager and a large corporate institution. Poor outcomes get explained through engagement, attendance becomes the standard answer to dissatisfaction with teaching, difficulty with fragmented services becomes evidence of inadequate independence, and predictable structural problems – overload, insecure housing, timetable chaos – get met with “resilience” language and a referral to wellbeing services.

Students are partners when it’s time to co-produce and consumers when it’s time to pay, while “professionalism” requirements police the tone of criticism rather than its substance. Watch how the institution’s account of the relationship shifts depending on which description is most advantageous at any given moment:

When you’re being recruited, you’re an empowered chooser. When provision is weak, you may hear about your engagement. When you demand redress, you risk reclassification as a consumerist troublemaker. And when the rankings come out, you’re the evidence. The recurring asymmetry underneath is simple – success validates the institution, failure tests the student.

Defending the purchase

The psychology stacking the deck is mostly well established, if rarely assembled in one place. Aronson and Mills demonstrated in 1959 that the more severe the initiation, the more people value the group they’ve joined – and an admissions cycle of personal statements, interviews, offer-holder days, deposits and moving house is a perfectly serviceable initiation rite.

Choice-supportive bias means people misremember their chosen option as better than it was, and higher education adds an incentive most purchases lack – because the seller’s reputation prices the qualification, publicly devaluing your university feels like devaluing your own certificate. Complaining about the product means talking down your own asset.

Gratitude on its own doesn’t need to suppress anything – grateful people complain all the time. Indebtedness is the more accurate description, because it implies obligation – they did something for me, so I shouldn’t behave disloyally.

A discount framed as an award manufactures that – a social relationship with a benefactor, in place of a transparent one between buyer and seller. And the machinery openly recruits students into maintaining the asset – telling them that NSS participation protects the value of their degree, treating public criticism as ammunition for rivals, selecting the enthusiastic for recruitment panels and paying student influencers to perform an aspirational version of the experience their coursemates are actually having.

The same message also hit differently for different students. A confident applicant from a graduate family may hear “they competed to recruit me – I have leverage”. A first-generation student may hear “they took a chance on me – I must prove I deserve to stay”.

For international students the indebtedness comes with teeth, because teaching, immigration sponsorship, accommodation, references and sometimes scholarship-renewal conditions all run through the same institution – and it’s worse for doctoral students, dependent on a supervisor for progression, funding, authorship, networks and examination, for whom the cost of voice can be a career.

The variable that matters is whether belonging feels secure (“I belong here, so I have a right to challenge it”) or conditional (“my membership was a favour, and criticism might prove I never deserved it”).

Grateful people don’t ask for refunds

Once you’ve seen it once, you see it everywhere. “The provision is inadequate” becomes “perhaps I’m not engaging properly”. “The course didn’t deliver what was promised” becomes “maybe university is just supposed to be difficult”. A demand becomes an apologetic query, postponed until marks, references or visas are safe – and the student defends the university to outsiders while slating it anonymously on Reddit.

The OIA’s caseload shows what awaits those who push through anyway. Students who chose a postgraduate course because it was advertised as professionally accredited discovered after enrolment that accreditation had ended – staff informally accepted the information was wrong, the formal process still required students to prove they’d been misled, and an initial £500 offer became a full fee refund plus £5,000 only after the OIA got involved.

Around the formal cases there’s the everyday architecture of containment – procedures buried several clicks deep, informal conversations required before anything is recorded, cohort-wide problems divided into individual cases with no group route, short deadlines for students and leisurely ones for institutions, compensation described as “goodwill”, settlements with confidentiality terms attached – and “you said, we did” campaigns that fix the microwaves and the library hours while staffing goes untouched.

The Competition and Markets Authority’s compliance review of the undergraduate sector found contract and complaint terms that could act as barriers to complaining at all, and it extracted commitments from named providers – on terms that gave broad discretion to alter courses, and on the practice of withholding graduation, certificates and re-enrolment over unrelated non-tuition debts.

So when a provider points to low complaint numbers as evidence of satisfaction, remember what a formal complaint requires – picking the right procedural category, contemporaneous evidence, short deadlines, complaining first to the people you’re complaining about, and persistence while the institution in question continues to mark your work, write your references and sometimes sponsor your visa.

A formally fair process still converts a collectively experienced institutional problem into a quasi-legal individual case. Low complaint volume is compatible with excellent provision – and equally compatible with highly effective gratitude framing.

Put the whole cycle together and it looks like this:

manufacture scarcity = confer recognition = secure commitment = obscure provision = transfer responsibility = capture voice = recruit students into defending the credential

Publish the denominator

Some scarcity is real – research supervisors have finite capacity, clinical and placement-based courses carry genuine caps, and “limited places” on those pages describes an actual constraint.

And none of what I’m describing needs a villain – conversion targets, ceremonial tradition and ambient consumer psychology can produce the whole effect between them without anyone ever sitting down to plan the suppression of complaints.

The trouble is that from where an applicant sits, genuine rationing and ordinary sales urgency look identical – and a sector both desperate for cash and with the ASA, CMA and OIA record above doesn’t get to claim a presumption of innocence.

OfS’ current student protection proposals set up misleading marketing, pressurised recruitment and the discouraging of complaints as regulatory red lines – which sets up an obvious early test.

Is “secure your place in the next 48 hours”, from a provider forecasting a deficit, pressurised recruitment – or just how the market talks now? A sector that made 1.3 million offers to school leavers while telling all of them to hurry ought to find that question uncomfortable. Whether the regulator finds it easy will tell us plenty.