Student support isn’t neutral – it can protect institutions as much as students

Student “support” occupies an almost unquestioned position within higher education discourse.

Invoked across policy, strategy, and practice, support is presented as an unequivocally positive response to increasingly complex student needs. As reflected in From Support to Success, debates centre on its effectiveness and expansion. Within this framing, more support is assumed to be inherently beneficial. However, the concept of support shouldn’t be conflated with the provision of support services. While services represent institutional responses to identified needs, support itself warrants critical scrutiny.

Universities don’t simply respond to need, they help produce it. Higher education isn’t a neutral space but one shaped by assumptions about learning, knowledge, and belonging. Hidden expectations organise success, privileging confidence, independence, and particular ways of communicating, thinking, and writing. Rarely made explicit, these norms signal who belongs and who does not. For those already aligned with them, university feels natural; for others, disorienting or hostile. Rooted in racialised, gendered, classed, and colonial ideas of the “ideal student”, these norms continue to structure institutional life.

Student support is presented as neutral, benevolent, and responsive to individual need. Embedded within discourses of widening participation, student success, and duty of care, it appears to sit outside power and politics, serving only students’ interests. Yet student support is never politically innocent – it functions as a form of institutional protection while it’s shaped by political and economic conditions that determine whose needs are recognised and how they are addressed.

Influenced by regulatory demands and reputational concerns, it cannot be understood solely as care. Framing support as the solution to student need can also obscure questions about the inclusivity of higher education. Rather than asking only how support can be improved, we should also examine how institutional systems and norms produce the inequalities it seeks to address.

Conditional care

These inequalities become particularly visible within a neoliberal, marketised higher education sector that produces forms of conditional support.

Universities are expected to demonstrate care while simultaneously safeguarding performance, income, and reputation. Support therefore operates within institutional logics that serve institutional needs, with services increasingly tied to metrics such as NSS scores and continuation rates. In this context, dissatisfaction is “managed” rather than used to challenge structural conditions. Support becomes a technology of governance, reputation management, and risk containment rather than an act of care.

Through formal processes and expectations, students are made responsible for navigating complex systems and presenting their needs in institutionally acceptable ways. Universities therefore don’t simply support students; they shape behaviour, encouraging challenges to be understood through frameworks of compliance, audit, and control. Consequently, support systems help produce self-regulating students while simultaneously protecting institutional interests.

Managerialism and audit culture prioritise standardisation, metrics, and defensibility over compassion. Support therefore functions as managed care, demonstrating institutional diligence while leaving inequalities intact and shifting responsibility for inclusion onto students.

Support as a sorting mechanism

In practice, support functions as a sorting mechanism. Students unable to navigate higher education’s hidden curriculum are identified as “in need” and directed into interventions such as study skills, wellbeing, and academic support. Thus, support is shaped by dominant assumptions about competence, belonging, and success, often reproducing the inequities it seeks to address. In doing so, it can reinforce deficit understandings that place responsibility for adaptation on students rather than institutions.

Across higher education, inclusion is often framed through a deficit lens, positioning “underrepresented” or “non-traditional” students as lacking what is needed to succeed. The answer is more support, offered as inclusion but aimed at adaptation. This individualises inequality and obscures its structural causes. Rather than challenging the norms that reproduce inequality, support mechanisms create the need for students to adapt. Structural inequities are reframed as individual deficits to be managed. Students are not explicitly excluded but positioned as needing help to become the “right kind” of student, while institutional structures remain intact. These norms, including ableist expectations of independence and productivity, continue to shape practice, requiring assimilation rather than inclusive institutional transformation.

Importantly, deficit-led models of support can undermine students’ sense of identity and belonging while diverting attention from structural inequities. By positioning students as the problem to be addressed, institutional norms and assumptions escape scrutiny. Support becomes an invitation into higher education on terms that leave dominant ways of knowing and being unquestioned. Rather than dismantling inequality, support can help sustain the status quo by demonstrating action without requiring meaningful structural change.

The neutrality illusion

By keeping expectations implicit, universities maintain an illusion of neutrality. The system appears fair, even compassionate, while those excluded by its norms become visible as problems to be addressed.

Support becomes part of the institutional story: we care, we act, we are inclusive. Yet it can also function as a form of institutional self-protection, deflecting attention from the structures that (re)produce inequality. Rather than questioning curriculum design, assessment practices, or organisational culture, the focus shifts to how well students are being supported to fit existing norms. We argue for a different starting point: structural inequality. If inclusion is the goal, the question is not how students can acquire the cultural capital needed to succeed, but how institutions can transform to serve all students, staff, and communities.

This means shifting from a deficit model to a structural understanding of inequality. It requires recognising that exclusion is not an accident, but foundational to institutional design. This demands that responsibility for change sits with universities themselves, not with students. Therefore, rethinking support as institutional transformation requires universities to make explicit the often hidden expectations embedded within curricula, assessment and academic culture.

It involves attending to affective atmospheres, recognising that belonging is shaped not only by policy but also by students’ emotional and relational experiences of university life. Institutions must critically examine normative assumptions about whose knowledge, identities, behaviours and learning practices are deemed legitimate, and redesign systems to anticipate diverse forms of participation. Students should be positioned as partners whose lived experiences reveal how exclusion is reproduced, not as subjects “at risk” and “in need” of institutional support.

Until universities stop treating inequity as a problem located within students, support will continue to (re)produce the very inequalities it claims to address, managing and preserving the status quo of inequality under the guise of care. Perhaps the question is not how universities can provide better suppor”, but why so many students must first be constructed as needing support to participate fully.