No two universities can ever be the same – the infinite variety of the student experience

We know quite a lot about ‘the student experience’, particularly around social class and gender, less so on other background dimensions such as sexuality, race and disability. We also know a certain amount about students’ lives in marketized systems. This paper presents the findings from a project which continued to ask questions along these social and policy lines but also simultaneously explored the influence of a university’s organisational culture and geographies. The intention is to expand how we can think about the student experience more broadly, and to better understand the different ways in which the university itself mediates it.