Constructing higher education on social media: evidence from student content creators in the UK and Estonia

This article explores how student content creators from two European higher education systems – the highly marketised UK context and the tuition-free system in Estonia – construct the purposes of higher education and present themselves as students on social media. Drawing on a Foucauldian framework and an in-depth study comprising interviews with 22 student content creators alongside analysis of their social media content, we argue that these students navigate two interlocking normative regimes: neoliberal higher education discourse, which positions higher education as an investment and students as entrepreneurial investors in their economic future, and platform economy discourse, which rewards the commodification of experience and the optimisation of self-presentation for attention markets. We show that student content creators engage in negotiated self-making – assembling identities from multiple, sometimes contradictory discursive registers. Some reproduce neoliberal rationality through employability talk and performative productivity; others exceed it through content organised around joy, community and collective care. We further show that social media platforms are co-producers of higher education discourse, operating through algorithmic curation, genre conventions and monetisation structures. The article contributes a theorisation of student-creator subjectivity at the intersection of neoliberal HE and platform capitalism.