‘It’s like the Scottish Upper East Side’: shame and snobbery as American students blamed for St Andrews classism
But in the two weeks since she published her story on LinkedIn, it has resonated with hundreds of others.“Working-class students have been made to feel ashamed of their home life at university,” the former comparative literature and classical studies student wrote in a lengthy post. “Arriving at a university ranked first in the UK at the time from a background like mine, I thought I was doing everything right.“I don’t mean for this to be a sob story but an explanation. I recognise the privilege of access to higher education, however I am also brutally aware of the hidden privilege of having unobstructed access to studying for a degree.
- ▪But in the two weeks since she published her story on LinkedIn, it has resonated with hundreds of others.“Working-class students have been made to feel ashamed of their home life at university,” the former comparative literature and classic
- ▪“Arriving at a university ranked first in the UK at the time from a background like mine, I thought I was doing everything right.“I don’t mean for this to be a sob story but an explanation.
- ▪I recognise the privilege of access to higher education, however I am also brutally aware of the hidden privilege of having unobstructed access to studying for a degree.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — World |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/sep/27/st-andrews-university-class-divide-american-students |
| Publication time | Sun, 27 Sep 2026 07:00:59 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-27T07:15:40.986Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-27T07:15:40.986Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vFhXmjEvhWfc · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘It can be quite segregated: the English hang out with the English, the Americans with the Americans.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘It can be quite segregated: the English hang out with the English, the Americans with the Americans.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianUniversity of St Andrews‘It’s like the Scottish Upper East Side’: shame and snobbery as American students blamed for St Andrews classismOnline comments reflect class tensions at Scottish university between those from lower-income families and wealthier US undergraduatesPatrick GreenfieldSun 27 Sep 2026 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 27 Sep 2026 03.08 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleWhen Sophie Rose Jenkins announced she would not return to St Andrews University this academic year…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — World.
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