The massification of Higher Education (HE) has seen a significant rise in young people attending university over the last quarter century, meaning that young adults born between 1981 and 1996–so-called ‘Millennials’–have generally higher levels of educational qualifications than previous generations. In broader terms, this cohort has, in recent years, taken on significance in wider debates about politics, civic participation, work-life balance and personal relationships. The figure of ‘the millennial’is highly contradictory, becoming synonymous with self-interest and a sense of entitlement while at the same time embodying emotional fragility and economic precarity (Allen, Finn & Ingram, 2020). More often, the millennial is imagined through discourses of lack, failure and decline. This emerges in fairly broad terms, however, it manifests with particular veracity in relation to the contemporary HE student, as exemplified by this article in the Times Higher:

Millennials don’t read. They don’t think as critically as they could. And they’re not interested in learning for learning’s sake. They want the Dream. They will go into debt to get that degree they believe will help them pursue it, but they have lost respect for knowledge, rigour and hard intellectual work. Working among such entitled puppies makes me feel like an academic platypus out of water.(Vehko, 2018, para. 30)