‘The student experience’ did not exist when I first started my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh in 2008. People may have used those words, but they did not have a ‘thingness’ to them; it was not yet management lingo or survey material. We did not measure it, compare it, or discuss it in such weighty and reified terms. How do you measure something so amorphous as ‘the student experience’? An experience at university is very particular, influenced by biography, expectations, identities, the people one is (un)lucky enough to be surrounded by, and wider events, like COVID-19. Many aspects of the student experience have nothing to do with the quality of the teaching, the general provision of support services, or the supposed value of a degree. And yet, measuring and ranking the student experience is a yearly pursuit in UK universities through the National Student Survey (NSS).

The NSS has been surveying final-year undergraduate students in the UK since 2005, gathering opinions about degree programmes and broader experiences at university. Student (dis)satisfaction is measured through a series of statements, tick-box responses, and the option to include written responses at the end of the survey. Numerical NSS results are then used as a proxy measure for quality of provision, informing university league tables, course comparison websites, the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and university branding. The survey results continue to be used to rank and compare universities and courses as if factual, accurate reflections of university and course quality, informing prospective student decisions about where and what to study.