The literature on the role of academic support primarily focuses on its ability to enhance retention and persistence. Some studies focus on enhanced academic support for undergraduate students [4,7,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Often this support is targeted at underrepresented first-year students who are poorly prepared for university and may enter the institution with limited background academic capital to the extent that they may have little specific knowledge about how university ‘works’ [15]. The role here is one of attempting to level the playing field to address structural inequalities and support successful completion.

Other studies focus on supporting the persistence of all students equally, undergraduate and postgraduate [5,8,16,17,18]. These studies reason that undergraduate and postgraduate students face similar challenges when transitioning to university [18,19,20]. But postgraduate students have, by definition, successfully made that transition. Additionally, there is less evidence that high attrition rates are problematic in postgraduate education. Such studies appear at odds with those identifying a greater need in the undergraduate, underrepresented cohort.

Academic support can be either formal, accessed within or through the institution, or informal, accessed outside the institution through social contacts. The effectiveness of academic support is variably related to its responsiveness [5], timing [16], flexibility [21], quality [22], and perhaps most importantly, uptake [12,23].

Within the institution, academic support is often offered on campus and in person. The advantages of this Socratic style are well documented [7,12,13]. Students develop transferable skills such as problem posing, problem solving, and critical thinking. However, there are problems with this type of support. It is often restricted to office hours, and so does not serve the needs of part-time/distance students [6,16]. It can also be presented as more formal as students make appointments and wait to be seen. This delay in obtaining help may be off-putting for less confident learners. Working-class first-year undergraduate students are less likely to initiate formal help-seeking [17,24], and are more likely to ask for help from peers over professors [4,17]. While peer support is hailed as valuable for underrepresented undergraduate students [17], there are inherent dangers; peer support may be inaccurate or incorrect. It may therefore be best not to rely on peers for hard information.

Increasingly, technology is playing a role in academic support provision in higher education [5,6,8,16,25]. Online support can be provided by staff within the institution, or it can be outsourced to a third party, a practice known as ‘unbundling’ or ‘distributed’ support. Benzie and Harper [10] (p. 645) argue that academic support in more distributed learning environments is problematic because ‘...they contribute to a context for writing that is unbounded, generic, and fragmented’. This criticism is echoed by Gurney and Grossi [26], who state that the capacity of third-party providers to develop students’ autonomy as academic communicators is restricted. They tend to ‘fix’ students’ work, rather than encouraging them to think autonomously. Rambiritch [13] (p. 58) also sees such consultations as editing rather than dialogue and calls for ‘evaluating the quality of such contributions to student development’.

Yet technology can and does support dialogue, both synchronous and asynchronous. Amador and Amador [9] report on the success of Facebook in generating a sense of community through online interactions. A study of Live chat by Broadbent and Lodge [11] highlighted how responsive the service was, particularly for online students, who felt more cared-for and connected to the institution due to the service. Dollinger et al. [16] also report positively on the Connect Live service offered by Studiosity, where students were connected in real time with a human tutor, to support their learning. However, while the potential exists for dialogue in the online environment, the extent to which dialogue or, in a related sense, instrumental support, takes place is not explored.

There are challenges with third-party support. There can be problems with acceptance of such provision within the institutional culture, problems with different tutors giving different advice, and overly positive feedback being provided to students by the third party [4,6,10]. Notwithstanding such criticism, the availability of online support outside regular office hours is particularly welcomed by students, especially students who are working, or are living in time zones which differ from the institution [16]. Evaluations of online support generally receive high student satisfaction ratings [8,16].

Academic help-seeking relates to students seeking help with academic learning [22,27,28], primarily in relation to understanding course content [29]. Within the literature, help-seeking is broadly divided into two categories: instrumental and expedient [27].

While instrumental help-seeking often takes the form of dialogue [10,13], it more generally relates to the student seeking to solve the problem themselves by asking for explanations of concepts they do not understand [22].

Conversely, expedient help-seeking is seen to be asking for help with something one is/should be capable of solving oneself [29]. What one is capable of solving oneself is likely to be different for different student cohorts, though this point is not fully addressed in the literature.

While Calarco [29] identifies that both methods of help-seeking lead to improved academic performance, this is disputed by Golann and Darling-Aduana [30], who point out that with expedient help-seeking, students become over-reliant on others, limiting higher-order cognition. Expedient help-seeking is therefore regarded as less likely to lead to deep learning, and so is sometimes regarded as of less value than instrumental help-seeking [10,13,22,26,31].

The literature highlights how first-generation undergraduate students prefer to engage in less formal help-seeking, with a preference for resources that are convenient, reliable, easy to access and online [17,32]. Certainly, to overcome any internalised stigma against help-seeking [33], and reframe the way students view it [17,34], the importance of informal style, accessible help is important. While students with high levels of academic capital may be able to avail themselves of this type of help through their social networks, this option is not often open to working-class students who may be the first in their family to attend college and may have few friends progressing to university. So although expedient help is seen as less valuable in the literature, for some students, expedient help-seeking may be a prerequisite to instrumental help-seeking. It may break down barriers to help-seeking and allow students to see it as a normal aspect of university study. This may be particularly important for underrepresented undergraduate students.

What Bourdieu [35,36,37] recognised as ‘cultural or academic capital’ and Lareau [38] as a ‘sense of entitlement’ results in students from more middle-class backgrounds having assertiveness and an ease in interacting with authority [30]. Those from more working-class backgrounds tend to operate with ‘a sense of constraint’ [39], showing more caution when interacting with authorities or avoiding interaction altogether. This practice persists to the extent that by the time students enter university, their help-seeking behaviour tends to be well established [27,30].