STUDENTS at St Andrews say a recent viral “anti-Scottish classism” story reflects a wider reality of accent, class and belonging inside the university bubble.
The viral post – in which scholarship student Sophie Rose Jenkins described being excluded from tutorials because peers and staff said they “couldn’t understand her accent” – left many students sad but unsurprised.
Jenkins said she had dropped out after the second year of her Comparative Literature and Classical Studies degree course after being left feeling “isolated” after being excluded by her peers due to her Scottish accent.
On campus, the majority have read the story or seen the original post by Jenkins which has gone viral.
“It’s quite heartbreaking to think that the girl dropped out because of it. It’s made me quite sad to see, to be honest,” Janine, in her fourth year and from Shetland, shared.
Miguel, a fourth-year from Dalkeith, said: “I think it’s kind of made me reflect that I’ve been quite lucky that I’ve managed to find my people at university.
“But also I think it's been a good experience cause I've become friends with people from so many different walks of life as well, and people that I wouldn't have met otherwise that have such different upbringings and like different come from different like social circles and it's just a shame that she's not been able to have the experience that I've had with coming to a place like St Andrews.”
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.
The accent discrimination is a gateway into class assumptions, which surface in "microaggressions", one student described.
Janine added: “I’m from the Shetland Islands and we only have one school where I’m from, and what I noticed when I came here, people were asking a lot, like, ‘Oh, what school did you go to?’
“It seemed to be this big kind of important thing.”
All four students in the below video said they were not surprised that a student has accused the institution of having a “culture of anti-Scottish classism”.
Lucia, from London, noted: “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. Code-switching is when you change your accent depending on the situation. 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.”
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.”
American graduate student, Owen, observed: "You get a sense that those with more of a posh accent seem to do better than those who don’t. There’s more of like the class split that I think you see that St Andrews is kind of famous for."
He added that for UK students compared to the US students “it still matters where you went to, whether you went to state school or private school".
Many also described St Andrews as culturally detached from the rest of Scotland.
"It doesn’t really feel like you’re in Scotland when you’re here. It does feel in ways that you’re at international school or something,” Janine said.
Miguel added: “People have referred to it as the fifty-first state.”
