Student influencers fill gaps in university support services

Social media platforms are part of everyday life for many (if not most) students worldwide. While we may think of social media use as community building and offering a sense of belonging for young people, our research shows that students increasingly turn to TikTok, Instagram and other platforms to gain support with their university studies. Behind this shift is what we call the rise of the new type of student – the student influencer.

Our interdisciplinary project on youth and studenthood in digital spaces centred around how and why some students develop a large following on social media and become so-called influencers.

Alongside digital analysis, we interviewed 13 United Kingdom-based student influencers with a follower count ranging from a couple of thousand to over a million. The participant group involved students from both home and international student backgrounds, but they all produced educational content or so-called #studytalk.

Additional support

As many universities struggle with a decreasing staff-student ratio, student influencers have become the additional support for young people who need to navigate their studies and-or prepare for challenging transitions to graduate jobs.

In England (and possibly in many other parts of the world), one could also assume that student frustration is simmering as tuition fees climb, and that they expect more support and richer resources. We also know that universities struggle to reconcile these demands with their shrinking real-term budgets.

It is therefore unsurprising that we now have a group of students – student influencers – who have taken matters into their own hands and produce #studytalk to provide personalised support on young people’s university choices as well as study tips once they are in higher education.

These student influencers tend to be academically high-achieving students (for example, one interviewee said: “I’m always like the top three students”) with an excellent track record of academic achievements and a clear graduate career path in mind.

Such positioning as successful students creates a sense of legitimacy and authority when it comes to producing educational content. In the case of our interviewees, it also resulted in a large-scale youth and student following on social media platforms.

Building a brand

There is an important distinction in terms of how student influencers direct their content either to home or international student audiences. Student influencers clearly understand the intricacies of social media and higher education markets.

Within the context of this study, the domestic students tended to target other home students with content related to providing advice on university admissions and graduate jobs that most young people are concerned with when planning entry to or exit from higher education.

Student influencers from international backgrounds, however, tend to focus on providing university-level study tips to other international students. This was explained in relation to helping international students to adjust to the academic expectations and study cultures in the UK.

Such differentiated positioning is unsurprising as the social media industry centres on authenticity, and student influencers, like any other influencers, are skilful at identifying their own distinctive brand in the wider market.

It has also led to lucrative part-time work: most of our student influencers worked with brands to advertise products for reputable retail companies and banks. They earned an income of £1,000 (US$1,220) to £2,000 (US$2,440) for a short TikTok video and they often earned £15,000 to £20,000 a year from advertisement work.

Making studying easier

Student influencers tend to promote a particular understanding of university education which relates to making studying ‘easier’ and ‘smarter’. Our participants focused on the idea of “which student doesn’t want to study less, but get the same grades?” (as interviewee 8 put it).

To address this challenge, the influencers provided step-by-step advice on how to structure essays or to construct an argument, among other academic tips.

It is therefore evident that through #studytalk, students have started to produce new types of academic practices, where complex processes such as critical analysis become something that can be quickly mastered by detailed instruction.

From such a perspective, mastering academic skills is less a cumulative process and more something that can be accelerated and ticked off. It is less clear how effective these practices are, and future research should interrogate that further.

‘This isn’t my career’

While producing #studytalk could be considered one of the best paid (and least regulated) part-time jobs for today’s students, our influencers emphasised that they see their careers outside of the influencer marketing industry. They aspired to traditional graduate jobs and saw content creation as a temporary phase while navigating through their own university journeys.

In other words, academically successful students can utilise their achievements to become student influencers, but that does not necessarily mean that they are on a trajectory to become professional or celebrity influencers. In fact, many student influencers are very good at setting boundaries to protect their study time and their successful academic and graduate trajectories.

Lessons learned

This study shows that there is now an emerging group of students on social media – student influencers – who exploit the gaps in marketised higher education but also fill these by offering a new type of student-centred support via the #studytalk medium.

This new medium of student support invites us to consider how we understand and develop student support practices: student support is clearly more than the formal university offering, and it increasingly crosses the conventional university boundaries.

Furthermore, we have also learned that the student influencers producing #studytalk posts have high levels of reflexivity in their understanding of social media, the influencer marketing industry and their own role within shaping the experiences and aspirations of other students.

Student influencers are not the ‘victims’ of social media or influencer marketing industry, but they make these new opportunities work for them without sacrificing their academic success or graduate aspirations.

Rille Raaper is an associate professor at Durham University, United Kingdom. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; and b) student agency, citizenship and political activism.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.