Co-authored by Sorush Sepehr and David Waller (UTS Business School)
Universities often rely on administrative categories to guide funding, support and policy. Categories like first‑in‑family, international student, low SES, disability‑registered, and First Nations make some forms of hardship highly visible, but they also create blind spots. Many students experiencing significant stress fall outside these labels and become effectively invisible within institutional systems.
Between the hyper‑visible and the formally recognised are students whose struggles rarely appear in university data. These include students working 30-60 hours a week in hospitality, logistics, care work or retail; international students who do not meet ‘at‑risk’ criteria but face housing stress, overcrowding or exploitative employment; students with caring responsibilities; and students who meet equity criteria but reject the labels because they associate them with deficit or stigma.
Whose vulnerability are we seeing?
As a result, many students across the Australian higher education sector remain invisible to institutional systems until they reach a crisis point. This is because vulnerability is not simply something individuals have; it is something that is actively produced through how hardship is noticed, categorised and acted upon. As we argue in our recent research on observed vulnerability, whose struggles become visible (and whose do not) depends largely on how powerful observers such as institutions, policymakers, managers, the media and educators define and recognise vulnerability.
Vulnerability isn’t always obvious. For many, working long hours is a necessity in a high cost‑of‑living environment, but it pulls them away from study and class time. International students may avoid disclosing hardship due to visa precarity or fear of bureaucratic consequences. Their experiences remain unrecorded because the categories universities use to ‘see’ hardship do not capture the full picture.
When invisibility becomes exclusion
When educational institutions fail to recognise certain groups, exclusion is rarely intentional – but it is still real. Students who remain unseen may not access financial assistance even when eligible, do not request special consideration despite major responsibilities, quietly disengage from subjects, or experience instability in housing, food or work that never appears in formal support systems.
This invisibility has consequences. Hardship deepens not because students are inherently vulnerable, but because the system does not recognise or respond to their circumstances. Problems grow quietly until they become far more difficult to address.
Rethinking how we ‘see’ students
If institutional categories can inadvertently produce vulnerability, universities need to rethink how they identify and support students. Three shifts are essential:
1. Move beyond administrative categories
Equity categories remain important, but they cannot capture every form of hardship. Universities need both top‑down classifications and bottom‑up ways of noticing students whose struggles fall outside formal labels. Frontline tutors, lecturers, and advisers play a crucial role by creating small moments of openness where students can share contexts that do not fit neatly into existing categories.
2. Prioritise relational visibility
Students often reveal hardship through everyday interactions long before anything appears in data. Exhaustion, repeated absences, apologetic emails or rushed participation between shifts are early cues. Currently, these insights are informal and inconsistent. Universities should treat this relational noticing as core infrastructure: training staff to recognise signs of stress, respond appropriately and flag concerns through simple, supported pathways.
3. Design teaching for all students
Flexible assessment, multimodal participation, extended deadlines and trauma‑informed communication support students who disclose hardship, as well as those who never will.
Taking responsibility as observers
Visibility is shaped by observers – by us. Reducing invisible hardship requires formal mechanisms that support bottom‑up insight, clear escalation pathways and confidence that staff observations will lead to action. When universities see students differently, they support them differently, and when support expands beyond formal categories, no student is left invisible.
Read the full article as originally published on THE Campus.