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In higher education (HE), students’ expectations of success are a significant predictor of their motivation, academic attainment and future workplace choices. However, research has mostly focused on students’ levels of success rather than how they define success, and important element to understand their future trajectories in the workforce. In online written interviews with 36 UK university students, we examined how students define success and how their identities (gender and subjective socioeconomic status, SSS) underpin variation in these definitions. Following a reflexive thematic analysis, we created three main themes:(a) success as a source of personal development,(b) success as individual mobility, and (c) lack of clarity about what success is. Our results shed light on an important paradox in HE: while students tend to define success in relatively individualistic ways, such as individual mobility, financial success, or personal development, it was clear that their group memberships (gender, SSS) and related experiences played a key role in creating notable differences in how success was defined. This further implies that, when universities encourage a perception of success as centrally about individual mobility (eg, having better job opportunities, by espousing the belief that HE and/or professional sectors are truly meritocratic)–this will not always align to, and may create tension for, students from disadvantaged groups.