In England, higher education is more marketised than ever before as the difference between students and consumers is increasingly blurred, propelled by the rise in tuition fees. With students demanding more for their money, the role of university lecturers continues to change. This study explores the ways in which lecturers re-evaluate and reconstruct their roles and responsibilities in light of heightened student expectations. We draw on 30 in-depth interviews with lecturers from the social sciences, across two post-1992 universities in England, where tuition fees have tripled since 2012. We focus on lecturers' views and experiences of student expectations, as well as the support available to students as we shift towards a more consumerist approach in higher education. We find examples of tension between academic values and consumeristic student expectations as lecturers discuss their precarious positions as an educator as well as an entertainer. We believe that the expanding role of lecturers merits an urgent review at the institutional and national level, to promote and ensure clarity of the boundaries and expectations of teaching staff.

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This paper contributes to our understanding of the 'ideal' university studenta working concept that promotes a more transparent conversation about the explicit, implicit and idealistic expectations of students in higher education. Drawing on Weber's theory of ideal types, we explore university staff and students' conceptualisation of the 'ideal' student. Informed by 20 focus groups with 75 university staff and students, we focus on how the concept of 'ideal' student is perceived, challenged and negotiated. We argue that the 'ideal' student has important conceptual and practical implications for higher education, especially the importance of explicitness and the dangers of presumptions. The concept has the potential to bridge differences and manage expectations between lecturers and students, which have been stretched due to consumerism, by offering a platform where expectations of university students are elaborated. We present a working definition of 'ideal' university student, which, we argue, encompasses desirability, imperfection and realism.

Research on the 'ideal' or 'good' student tends to be situated within compulsory schooling. Few recent studies have focused on lecturers' conceptualisation and construction of the 'ideal' university student. Informed by 30 in-depth interviews with lecturers from two post-92 English universities within the social sciences, we explore how the notion of 'ideal' student is understood in contemporary higher education. We focus on lecturers' expectations of undergraduate students, as well as their views of the 'ideal' student in different teaching and learning contexts. We identified specific personal and academic skillsets that are desirable of students, including preparation, engagement and commitment, as well as being critical, reflective and making progress. The ability to achieve high grades, interestingly, is rarely mentioned as important. Implications for policy and practice are discussed as we present a muchneeded update on the current features of the 'ideal' university student, which can influence student experience, especially the lecturer-student relationship.

Personal Statements are considered as an academic promotional genre that students will usually have to compose as part of their application for graduate study. Yet, relatively little research has explored this type of text across institutional contexts. The present study looks into the personal statement and also explores the perspectives of writers who composed these texts in the context of PhD admissions. The text data were drawn from 21 PhD students at one UK-and one USbased university with the aim to explore rhetorical patterns of structure of the student personal statements following genre analysis. Student interviews were used to complement the results of text analysis to better understand how they present and position themselves in their texts. The findings reveal that the rhetorical moves and the discoursal construction of writer identity are associated with their sense of writer positioning, sensitivity to target audience, and the context for this act of writing. The findings have implications not only for writing pedagogy but also for future research to investigate the different and often implicit features of the personal statement across different disciplines, programmes, and institutional contexts.