Local Residents Discriminating Against Student Development

We are a small property development partnership that mainly buy houses, do them up and either sell or rent them out. For our first major development project we recently bought a plot of land near the city centre which is predominately a student area being so close to the university. 

We applied for planning application to knock down the existing buildings which are an old barn and a dilapidated unoccupied house. We are planning on putting on the site a mixture of cluster apartments and studio apartments tailored for students, totalling 26 students at full capacity.

As soon as the planning notice went up and the consultancy period for local residents started there have been a steady flow of objections lodged on the online planning portal. All these objections state that the local residents do not want any more students in the area for various reasons that generalise the student population as being bad.

Is it possible the council would deny planning application based on such objections? Sounds discriminatory to say you do not want a certain class of people living in your area?

Thanks

Mike