Myths about students in higher education: Separating fact from folklore

Myths about students in higher education pervade both popular and academic literature. Such folklore thrives due to the belated development of systematic enquiry into higher education as a field of academic study, the neglect of an historical perspective, and an over-reliance on opinion-based scholarship and interview data drawn from University lecturers as a proxy for interpreting student attitudes. This paper analyses three popular myths about University students: expansion of the participation rate lowers academic standards (‘more means worse’), students in the past were more intrinsically motivated (‘loss of love for learning’), and learners apply market-based assumptions in engaging with higher education as a commodity (‘student-as-consumer’). These myths have an enduring verisimilitude but the evidence underpinning such claims cannot be empirically substantiated. It is argued that, taken collectively, these myths constitute a recurring moral panic about University students and that the veracity of such claims needs to be evaluated critically on this basis. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.