Young female university students and the dark economy of higher education in British television dramas Clique (2017) and Cheat (2019)

This article explores the conceptualisation of young female university students and the university as an institution in two British television dramas: Clique (BBC, 2017) and Cheat (ITV, 2019). In recent years higher education has been cast in newsmedia and documentary as a ‘dark economy’ with questionable recruitment practices, high stakes assessment, and a profit driven agenda. Students have been problematically positioned both as ‘victims’ of a corrupt and profiteering system and as ‘snowflakes’ incapable of rising to the challenges of higher education. Both Clique and Cheat engage explicitly with these discourses, and in this article, we analyse how these series serve both to reinforce and undermine a range of social and cultural anxieties about young female students in the cultural space of the university. We argue the genre positioning, aesthetic, and themes of the two series function to reflect a broader shift toward ‘darker’ representations of the university in popular culture that reveal widespread anxieties about shifts in the meaning and experience of a university education. We also argue that the positioning of the young women at the centre of these series as ‘troubled’ and ‘traumatised’ prior to their entry into the university functions to externalise the challenges currently facing UK (United Kingdom) Higher Education, representing the student as ‘the problem’ rather than the university system itself.