FORMER scholarship student Sophie Rose Jenkins’s LinkedIn account of being excluded from tutorials because peers said they “couldn’t understand her accent” has struck a chord far beyond her own experience – and on the streets around the university, students say her story is no outlier.
“We were saying, honestly, we hope that the university gets bad press,” a student from London tells me.
“It is a real issue and it’s common to say, ‘Oh, I don’t understand,’ and that sounds light-hearted, but after a while, I feel like that is a microaggression to a certain extent.”
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“Scottish people stick together” appears to be a saying on campus, with several repeating it to me while I walk around and hear stories of others who have transferred over the years with the predominant culture of exclusion adding to their negative university experience.
“Victims of the cliquiness,” one jibs. The third-year group I hear this from – studying management and sustainable development, English and philosophy, and anthropology – nod in agreement.
Another adds: “The best way to understand is to realise that that culture is literally 5% of this town, but they’re just the ones who dictate down.”
Accentism – when someone is unfairly judged, treated or singled out because of how they speak – is rife around the Fife campus.
In the UK, where accentism is tightly bound up with class prejudice, put freshly graduated teenagers in a small town with significant disposable income and little oversight, and the result is hardly surprising – and is having far-reaching ramifications for those such as Jenkins.
The University of St Andrews enrolled 10,356 students in 2024/25 and the institution says students from more than 120 countries are represented on campus.
However, figures published in 2026 showed that just 28.2% of students were Scottish, the lowest proportion of any university in Scotland.
St Andrews doesn’t hide the fact they market themselves as Scotland's “most international university”, but does that mean discrimination and exclusion should be the norm?
‘It’s much more subtle’
Annelia, from Aberdeenshire, is outside the Main Library with Lucy from Oxford. She does not speak with a typical Scottish accent and in ways, she is thankful to not have broad Scots.
“I think I’ve probably benefited from not sounding like I’m from where I’m from,” she admits.
“I remember when I applied to St Andrews, my teacher coming up to me and said, ‘You won’t belong there, people from here don’t go there’. That has stuck with me and I have ended up in situations where people have made comments saying ‘there are probably people at this university who went to state school and I’m like, ‘I’m right here. What are you on about?’.”
But then Scottish students don’t always recognise Annelia as from Scotland at first, while “the people who are like legitimately posh here know that I’m not”, so she finds herself in a middle ground at times.
Lucy has “a fairly typical South English accent and nobody’s ever had any issue understanding me” – which, she admits, has potentially made life easier – but she highlights that the accent story going viral at the moment is a gateway into the real issue faced by not just Scots.
The two fourth-years pivot from accent to class, and specifically to the private-state divide.
Lucy shares: “I think there’s bigger solidarity between people that went to state schools in England and people that went to state schools in Scotland versus people who are overall Scottish. Privately educated versus not is very real.”
The hierarchy did appear clear among the students I spoke to.
If you are Scottish but you sound posh, you’re in a much better position than if you sound Scottish. If you sound Scottish and you went to private school, you are also in a respectable position. If you sound Scottish and you went to state school, you are not welcome within certain groups. If you are privately educated and not Scottish, you are exactly what St Andrews welcomes.
But how does this play out in conversation? Is it a direct “state or private?” question in your freshers week?
“It’s much more subtle,” Annelia explains. “It’s much more listening to what people mention, for example, that their school used to go on a ski holiday every year and if you say, ‘Oh, I’ve never been skiing’, it comes through in things like that.”
Academic choices can be just as revealing, like what degree you did for A-level or Highers. “I did Russian A-level. There are very few states in this country that offer Russian A-level, so I never really dealt with that question,” Lucy explains.
Elsewhere, one student describes the way people figure out your background and then proceed to treat you based on it as “underhanded”.
At the same time, private-school networks stretch across borders, and this also contributes to the cliques of the university.
Annelia stresses: “They all know each other from being paired schools and trips away together. They really do.”
For one fourth-year from Shetland sitting in the quad with her friend from Edinburgh, arriving at St Andrews meant stepping into a world she hadn’t fully anticipated – and nearly walking away because of it.
“I almost dropped out too. I didn't realise it would be so international and so rich too. I just didn't do my research,” Janine shares.
Her friend, Miguel from Dalkeith, shares he qualified for St Andrews' guaranteed offer scheme, and nobody from his state school had been here in the three years prior.
“Right now, I think I'm the only person still here from my school,” Miguel says.
Reflecting on his first year, he said: “I was not used to anybody I'd met at all. I'd never interacted with people who were so rich. I'd barely met Americans in my life before coming here.
“But I think I was really quick to build a support network, so it made it a lot easier.
“You have to be outgoing and friendly to meet the right kind of people. If you're not, it can be quite hard.”
Janine nods, and I see that the elite school’s first lesson to students is sink or swim. Know your place or struggle trying to fit in.
The two also highlight that there is an underlying judgment towards Scots because students know they did not pay for their education and are therefore “not super-wealthy”.
‘I felt that’
When I approach one student asking for reaction to the viral story, she immediately replies, “I felt that”. A fourth-year student from Somerset – living in Dundee for this final year – Freja recounts a story from her second year.
“Because of the way that I speak – which apparently, it’s colloquial, I don’t know – the tutor assumed that I was working class, and that assumption wasn’t necessarily untrue, but it caught me off guard.
“They asked me where I was from and I said I’m from Somerset. And they said, ‘Oh, whereabouts?’ and I said, ‘We’re near Bridgwater.’”
The class was discussing potential ethnographic projects: If they were to return to their hometowns to conduct studies, what would they focus on?
“And he kind of spoke for me and said, ‘Oh well, because of where you’re from, you’d obviously do it on poverty and county lines and drug issues.’ “And I was like, ‘Well probably not, but I mean I guess it would be interesting.’ “It was just a bit weird to be like out in front of the whole tutor. Yeah, it was a weird experience.”
Jenkins also describes being surprised by the fact she was discriminated against not just by peers but by staff.
The social geography of the town reinforces division, Freja adds: “I’d say like birds of a feather, they flock together. Because the town is so small, I feel like when I’m walking through the streets, and I look at friendship groups it is very polarising the way that on the surface these friendship groups look.
“You have the French coat baddies with like the ballet slippers and then you have the more alternative groups, which I think is normal in a lot of circumstances to find your community, but I also think a big part of it is built on class."
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Asked whether the university could do more to break those patterns, she hesitates: “I feel like part of it is human nature, you find common things within people and become friends with those people because of those commonalities. And so I think in a lot of ways you can’t really do anything about it.”
When asked whether the scholarship student’s story surprised her, she replies: “No.”
Lucia, from London, also shared her experience where – despite having what she describes as a Received Pronunciation (RP) accent (an accent with roots in southern England) – she has also suffered from bullying at the university.
“In my second year a lot, I went to state school, and I remember getting called ‘Statey’ for a bit around that time.”
When asked if she felt that was OK, she said: “No, I didn’t think it was OK.”
She also notes: “Accent in the UK is based in class you can also tell a part of someone’s income and the school that they went to based on their accent.”
She also added that she has seen Scottish friends code-switch. The phrase refers to when you change your accent depending on the situation you're in. In the UK, where accent and dialect carry social weight, it is considered a common and sophisticated skill.
“The longer they spend in St Andrews, they start to have less of a Scottish accent. It becomes more English, I guess.”
Her friend Owen, from Colorado, says that the status of “private or state” doesn’t affect Americans at the university as much and it is much more prevalent in the UK citizen circles.
He adds: "There have been times when I've struggled to understand accents from other people as well, even who aren't Scottish, but the main thing is sticking with it and trying to get through it.
“Having the innate desire to say, ‘oh, I can't understand you’, therefore it doesn't matter what your speaking is awful and not surprising based on some people that I've met here.”
Lucy condemns students who say “I can’t understand you” to their Scottish peers.
“Especially people who grew up in this country, whether that was Cornwall or Aberdeen, who then can’t understand other people who are speaking in English regardless of their accent. What are you doing? Well, actually, what is wrong with you?
“Obviously if it’s someone whose English is their second language or they didn’t grow up in this country, that’s a bit different, but people who grew up in this country and can’t understand everyone in it who are all speaking English, I think that’s a bit … a bit diabolical, really.
Annelia admits that “it’s a bit rough sometimes for people” but stresses if you actually step outside of the St Andrews bubble, there are “a lot of people who are actually from the same background”.
“I’ve largely encountered people getting frustrated when they’re trying to insert themselves into privileged events which aren’t accessible to them.”
One student suggested I should talk to the clay society or find my way into the secret societies to meet the people who should be discussing this topic.
“Love and prayers if you do,” they joked.
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