Student millennials/Millennial students: how the lens of generation constructs understandings of the contemporary HE student

The massification of Higher Education (HE) has seen a significant rise in university participation over the last quarter century, meaning that young adults born between 1981 and 1996 – ‘Millennials’ – have generally higher levels of educational qualifications than previous generations. Millennials have ‘grown up with’ the marketisation of HE, and this generational label is often used interchangeably with ‘students’. Focusing on the UK, this chapter argues that the boom in HE participation, and the knock-on effect for conceptualisations of the millennial cohort, has led to narrow generational thinking about who HE students are and what they represent. Synthesising critical analyses of media commentary about HE and academic literature, this chapter argues that contemporary understandings about HE students’ values, responsibilities and outcomes often elide with broader narratives about generational change and crisis. Millennials are often portrayed as embodying a contradictory mix of privilege and precarity, hyper-sensitivity and indifference, and rampant self-interest. We illuminate how this generational concept operates to generate two dominant tropes within the construction of HE students: (1) as passive and entitled and (2) as fragile snowflakes. The discursive effect of these is to negate important differences in the student body, individualising and obfuscating the material and political difficulties students and graduates face.