‘They put you through this course which is supposedly for everyone, but it felt like it was aimed at problem spenders,’ Kieran, a first year student, tells me. ‘Essex made it mandatory to access hardship funds. It made my friends feel like their financial problems were their fault.’

I first met Kieran when we were talking about the rent strike movement he was shoring up at Essex. Kieran, among many others, carried forward two important lessons from the nationwide student rent strike: the first, that universities, existing as businesses, do not care about their students; the second, that those same students can access transformative power by mobilising to effect change – and can win.

One concession Kieran and his team won was a hardship fund for students experiencing financial difficulties. What they didn’t expect was that accessing this much-needed help would be another reminder of how financial inequality is still fundamentally misunderstood by university institutions.

‘From the beginning of university, I was struggling financially,’ Sarah, an economics student at Essex, tells me. ‘I don’t exactly have a trust fund, so I really needed some help.’

When Essex offered a hardship fund, Sarah applied straight away. £1,500 was on the table, and all applicants had to do was send over bank statements and complete some online financial learning modules. This is where Blackbullion comes in: an edtech platform aimed at affecting ‘better financial wellbeing by nurturing positive spending habits to avoid financial anxiety in the future.’

Vivi Friedgut, Blackbullion’s CEO, tells me she is ‘crazy passionate about our mission.’ In 2019, Blackbullion secured £400,000 to be the go-to financial platform for universities like Essex, Lancaster, and King’s, some of whom have made or previously made their financial learning quizzes mandatory in order to access financial bursaries and hardship funds.

The format is as follows: you take three courses—budgeting, savings, and investing—and at the end of each one, you take a quiz; you try again until you get it right. They teach you which expenses are fixed—rent, weekly food shops—and which are discretionary: ordering takeaway, going shopping.

‘Are you spending more than you thought on things you don’t need? Could you change the way you spend to better reach your budgeting goals?’ a warm, robotic voiceover to an Expenses 101 video asks. ‘Once you’ve planned ahead to make sure your expenses are covered, you’re well on your way to mastering your money and being able to spend without stress.’

‘It made me feel like a kid, like I don’t know what to do with my money,’ Sarah says. ‘I had to answer all these questions and get a certain mark before my application could go through. It felt so out of touch – this isn’t something that can be solved by not buying takeaway.’ She felt patronised by the assumption that young people weren’t well-informed, and that financial inequality was partly as a result of reckless spending.

New data shows there was a 22 percent increase in the number of university students from the most disadvantaged communities in the UK placed at high-tariff universities this year. Universities therefore need to be working harder than ever to tackle financial barriers to education – and allocating bursaries and financial hardship funds is one salient way of addressing this.

At Essex, it took a month for applications to be reviewed and funds to be allocated. One afternoon in April, Sarah was checking her bank account when she realised she’d finally been allocated the fund – but she’d only received £800.

A spokesperson for Essex said: ‘Thanks to extra Government support targeted at students facing hardship linked to renting their accommodation, we were able to offer support up to £1,500 for a limited period of time. We’ve been responding to unprecedented demand and receiving significantly more Hardship Fund applications compared to previous academic years. Despite the terms and conditions attached to this Government funding, we proactively reached out to students to support them to encourage them to submit an application and benefit from the funding available.’ Essex University’s full response is attached to the bottom of this article.

‘I got on the phone and they told me because of demand I could only get £800. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t pay for my accommodation and have enough left over to live with that money – it wasn’t enough,’ Sarah says. She adds that the bursary felt like a measly offering considering Essex generated a record level of income of £246.6 million in 2019.

‘It’s not the fault of people who assess these funds – they’re probably as overworked and stressed as we are,’ Kieran added. ‘It just feels wrong – like edtech companies are spotting that universities have to give students money because they’re poor, and wondering how they can profit off that.’

Vivi clarified that her team is working hard to minimise anxiety for students and help them better understand the steps towards financial wellbeing. She’s also introduced measures to speed up funding.

‘We’re not aware of any universities requesting this step in a funding application when it’s truly a case of financial emergency,’ Vivi said. ‘Our funding tool reduces the process from an average of 4-6 weeks down to 48 hours to help our partners get funds to students quickly. And we’ve worked really hard to make it secure, GDPR-compliant, and accessible for all, as previously, many students were isolated from applying for financial support since their accessibility needs were not catered for. The new instant payments feature will enable universities to deliver secure payments to students immediately instead of them waiting up to a fortnight.’

Discontent with the process required to receive meaningful financial help from institutions has also been raised by students at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). The Student Council there plans to lobby the university to ensure the Blackbullion course is not mandatory, citing the fact that the budgeting module could have a negative impact on students’ mental health, and implies a relationship between financial hardship and poor money management.

A spokesperson for UCLAN said: ‘The University offers a number of different hardship funds for our students. The Hardship Fund that is open to UK students requires the Blackbullion Budgeting 101 module to be completed as part of the application process. This standard fund assists students with day-to-day living costs for which budgeting is essential. Non-standard hardship fund applications, for when a student experiences an unexpected financial emergency or crisis, do not require the Blackbullion module to be completed.’

UCLAN’s SU President Zuleikha told me that this requirement for the standard fund is still too much. ‘It’s positive to hear that for some of these hardship funds, the university has clarified students do not need to complete the budgeting module in order to apply. We plan to discuss the possibility of removing the mandatory budgeting module from all the different financial hardship applications.’

After raising this with Essex, I get a new response. They tell me they have updated their system so students can ask to opt out of the educational elements of the Blackbullion platform. The information provided to students states: ‘Please note that you may request to opt out of completing the Blackbullion modules by providing notification of this in your application and providing the reason why you do not wish to complete them. This final decision is at the discretion of the assessor or the Funding Manager.’

A spokesperson for Essex added: ‘We sought to respond to the needs of our student community as early as possible during the pandemic and proactively put in place a range of measures to support students in a variety of ways. This includes support for IT needs and addressing digital poverty – including providing laptops where necessary, being as flexible as possible on accommodation we manage and investing in wellbeing and support services. As well as providing funding we offer advice and support about managing their finances.’

The closing remark of the Blackbullion website says that, ultimately, the responsibility of financial wellbeing lies with the individual: ‘Students’ ongoing financial success relies on them taking responsibility for their own financial futures. Universities can help, but the final say lies with the individual student.’

The student campaign at UCLAN represents an important fight to shift the responsibility for financial difficulty away from the individual, and back to the institutions which claim to empower and care for their students. Anyone who’s come from a low-income background knows that financial security is not solely at the whims of negative spending habits, and individualising the problem ignores the wide range of factors which structure the wealth divide.

Blackbullion itself is not to blame for this, but its role as middleman between the individual and institutional care is an important symbol of how universities shift the focus, framing inequality as something that can be tackled in obvious ways if students are savvy and play their cards right. Students’ consumer habits are attacked, while the role of student as consumer within the marketised university system is ossified, in a process which raises one of Blackbullion’s most interesting questions: which investments are worthwhile, and how could your money be better spent?