£9000 per year plus living costs and it is policy for the university tutor not to talk to,parents...am I being too precious?

[MillyDLA]

Just wondered your thoughts. My ds has missed the credits needed to move to his next year at uni, failing one exam by 2%. He has only just been told today that he can't return to uni until Sept 2017. I would have liked to have discussed this and meet with the personal tutor to support my ds in making the right choices. I want him to stop and consider all of his future options. However, even with my ds present the uni have refused any contact. I know my ds is a grown up, but this is a big decision. Added to that are all of the financial implications, student loans, a flat signed for for the whole of next year and future career/change of degree options. Big decisions to make.

I am interested in your thoughts around the lack of contact by the uni.

Thanks

Students also need to tick a box at registration saying the have read and understood the T&Cs of signing up to thier chosen degree programme. Often they haven't bothered to read this information either.

The Data Protection argument is a red herring. Can it be dropped- please? We've had several posters here who work in unis and are DP experts who say that it's quite possible for parents to be involved in discussions if their child wishes etc etc. (I know this too from my professional work having spoken to uni pastoral staff.)

The point is an adult child can bring a parent with them, but a parent cannot intervene without their consent. I do know the DPA, well actually the various different DPAs that have become law over the years.

I would have liked to have discussed this and meet with the personal tutor

^^

That is not 'my son wants me to be there'.

As a headteacher, how on earth can you NOT know that the DP act applies here?

We don't speak to parents even with the student's permission. The parents usually finance the studies and could therefore force such a permission.

Not entirely the point, I know, but some PhD students are very good teachers. Often they've received very recent training in teaching and are doing original work. I was taught during my undergraduate degree by someone who completed his PhD while he was supervising me. He's now a rather high-flying academic and I was very lucky to get to interact with him at a time when he was doing exciting new things.

Some universities do resits in June with results out in July, it just depends on their regs and schedules

I am surprised if the tutors won't speak to parents if they accompany the student, but IME parents rarely get involved in straight academic failure situations - pastoral/misconduct situations occasionally yes

If anyone is the customer in this situation it is the student, not the parent

Also I'm not sure what good parental intervention would do in this situation. the regs should be clear wrt progression requirements and parental intervention would not change that (I would start with the course handbook/spec)

Presumably even as an adult they are entitled to have another adult with them in any meeting so that could be the parent?

likedylan before you accuse me of lacking critical thinking skills, perhaps you'd read these articles

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/9357875/How-foreign-students-with-lower-grades-jump-the-university-queue.html

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-19945919

Just because you have no experience of it personally, doesn't mean it doesn't happen

Headmasters at some leading private schools have told The Daily Telegraph that some of their foreign pupils were being offered places with lower entry requirements than their British counterparts. this happened quite blatantly at my dd's private school.

If your son feels that he has not been treated fairly or has been misinformed (rather than he has misunderstood) about the regulations applying to his programme of study then he may be able to make an academic appeal (info on the regulations and the appeals process will be in his programme handbook). However in most Universities this process takes 3-6 months depending on how many stages there are and there is no guarantee of success. He can get advice from the Students Union.

If he is sharing his flat with students but is not actually a registered student then he will be liable for council tax as a single person which is 75% of the council tax rate for that property so needs to budget for that or find a student to take his flat share place.

To be honest if he's failed his first year, and failed his resit, then I'm surprised he's being given a third attempt at that module rather than being asked to resit the whole year. If he's not been allowed to carry the credit to be retaken alongside the second year modules then he's likely a weaker student who has already received the maximum amount of credit compensation on other units and therefore a higher academic load in the second year could be very detrimental to him.

Compensation rules are complicated (and IMO very stupid) but basically mean that a student who technically fails by getting below 40% in a unit can still proceed to the next year without resitting particular units. There's some more information on P22 here random set of Uni regs

Usually you can only get compensation for a maximum of 40 credits so you need to pass 80 credits as normal and get no less that 30% for the remaining 40 credits. If he only passed 60 credits, was compensated for 40 credits then he would still have had to pass a resit for the unit in which he received the lowest mark (normally). If he then failed that then he might be able to resit the year or resit particular units to meet the progression threshold

I have had this and there is no communication, no discussion of the reasons, no help with careers, no counselling. They just take the money and hide behind the rules. This was also a course dominated by overseas students.

It is especially difficult if there are undiagnosed problems like ADHD where they have managed to wing it through school, but when problems arise, they think it is all their own fault and do not seek support.

Not all universities are like this. Many of the less 'prestigious' ones take a bit more care at getting their students through.

TBH, I think it better to opt out when you fail the first year and rethink. There are better things to waste your money on. A couple of years in employment and then deciding what course in life you wish to take is more useful. It gives you a chance to find out what there actually is out there and work towards that.

Yes Rojak I did and given that the Telegraph article relates to a claim that the entry requirement criteria is adjusted downwards for international students rather than the way anonomised and moderated scripts are marked it is absolutely irrelevant.

The BBC Wales relates to postgraduate study and finds evidence of poor grammar and clumsy sentence structure. It doesn't say that students weren't marked down for this (they certainly would have been) or give details of what marks they received for their Masters degree or that the actual content or analysis was subpar. It doesn't give any evidence that non-native English speakers were given better marks than native English speakers who submitted a piece of work of the same quality.

One assumes that if he's failed at least one module once, then failed again, then either he's on the wrong course or that he's done f*ck all work this year and has spent all his time and money getting pissed/stoned and having a jolly good time.

Bounty

Ditto on the contact time. I'm there every week in office hours, waiting for people to turn up!

There really is no appropriate way for a parent to speak to lecturers. Our contract is with the student. How their place is funded is neither our business nor our responsibility (and we have certainly not chosen to impose these fees, as someone implied upthread!!)

No-one really expects 18 year olds to arrive as fully-formed adults. We expect them to be adults when they leave. I admit to some exasperation at the degree of involvement some parents expect in their adult children's university experience, but I recognise that it's mostly bitterness stemming from my personal damage (due to circs., I was essentially forced to be an adult by the age of 15/16 and I guess part of me wishes I had someone to 'parent' me a bit when I was a student, but hey ho, I came through it, them's the breaks). I've yet to have a parent call my office though.

I really want to flag up the point someone made earlier - universities aren't selling a product. You can't buy an education, even if we wanted to sell one. It's not possible. Universities aren't businesses, they're accrediting bodies: what we 'sell', for lack of a better word, is the opportunity of gaining an internationally recognised qualification, and the appropriate environment in which to pursue it.

Now that UK parents have to pay fees, I don't see why they shouldn't be treated as paying customers too

No UK parents have to pay university fees.

If people really want the customer model to apply then I hope they are prepared to pay the actual cost of degrees rather than the heavily subsidised version they currently pay. At the time the £9K p/a fees were introduced I think the estimate was that the real cost to the university per student was something like £12k p/a and the actual cost of an Oxbridge student place was £17k p/a. Plus, of course, if we are going down the university-as-business route, universities would be looking to make a profit, not just cover costs. So Oxford and Cambridge could start charging what their Ivy League peers in the US charge for domestic students - about £33,000 a year.

There are similar laws here in the US. Parents can't get information from universities without the student's consent.

The correlation between fee paying and parental involvement is also a red herring. Canada/ US have had fees for decades & many students graduate with massive student loan bills which can be calculated according to parental income - although not all are.

Parental involvement in students lives is on increase there too - despite no real changes in fees/ student loans like in the UK. The change is far more about neoliberal discourses around capitalism & consumption. Universities are far more careful around data protection now due to suing culture. There is an increasing expectation paying for something means the returns are perfect - with education this translates to parents who pay assuming it means their kids will come out with A*, walk into uni degrees & then in to excellent jobs. The process of education at the post-secondary level is lost amongst debates about consumer rights & the responsibility of young people to take control of their own lives.

I think I've said this before on Mn, but in the helicopter parenting stakes, I once had a parent phone me in order to ask if I could change one of the set texts on a literature module, because her daughter found it 'dark'.

I've also had parents show up with their 20/21 year old student offspring to query exam marks (on more than one occasion outraged at me for their poor showing because young X had told his mother he'd been to every class and been on time with every assignment, when one glance at X's face would tell the truth of the matter), to ask 'if I could find them a few extra marks somewhere' to allow them to get the 2.1 in second year that would allow them to apply for a postgraduate teaching qualification etc etc.

Once someone's mother and father came to an information session after the summer results, and wanted to come into my office to discuss their child while he waited outside in the corridor.

Citizen

A few years ago the mother of an MA student rang up to complain that it was unfair that her son hadn't been allowed on a departmental trip beacuse he'd failed to sign up in time to get a place.

Another person who works in a University and dreads parents becoming involved. Ime, it really doesn't help the students concerned. Their parents are giving them the message that they can't properly understand or deal with this situation, and I find it diminishes their ability to cope rather than increases it. It can be positive for them to confide in their parents and ask advice, but allowing (or being forced to allow) their parents to take over the interaction with the University tends not to go well.

In those situations, parents tend to have quite a partial view of what's gone on (eg. student says not supported when the student didn't show up for the support available, as described above) and a quite rigid view of the outcome they want. I'm not very convinced it's always what the student actually wants.

Ordinarily I don't think a parent would ever speak to anyone at a university about something to do with their child.

However, your son had clearly had some serious difficulties and I would think it is in everyone's best interests for him to have some support from you to sort it out. I am surprised the university isn't open to it.

I think there are some quite sanctimonious posts here along the lines of people being adults once they go to uni and parental input (when the student is in a serious situation, not ordinarily) being inappropriate. I wonder how many of these posters had their mum to help them out when they had a baby or other family support at critical times.

It isn't good to be so judgemental. Students do occasionally become so deeply unhappy that they commit suicide.

Also agree with a previous poster - the most constructive thing for OP to do is not to talk to the tutor. The decision is made, and that ship has sailed. What she can do is help her son understand why things went so badly wrong and what he needs to do next time round.

Your son is an adult why would they be contacting you?

I think there is recently almost a tendency to treat students as children - they are adults

The OP wanted to talk to the pastoral tutor, though, not academic tutors or lecturers, and with her son present, in order to be able to discuss with her son what might be best for him in the future, given the circumstances as the pastoral tutor could judge them and advise on.
Some of the examples university tutors give above of parental attempts at influence/interference are indeed outrageous, but I don't actually think the OP comes into that category, from what she has said. As to those saying parents should not pay the tuition fees, some parents are in circumstances where the Student Loan Company turns their student child down for the fees and yet they don't want our child to be deprived of a similar education to the one they had (but completely free, in some cases), so are forced to come up with the £9,000 themselves and therefore are definitely heavily invested in where that money goes. If that is the case, surely parents also need guidance as to whether it will be worth continuing to invest in their offspring's education, or whether it is a lost cause, and their child would be better off directing their energies into something else? Those of you who think most children suddenly become adults overnight when they turn 18 live in a different world - they may be considered "adults", but they are very often unable to act in a mature, responsible "adult" fashion and still need guidance (though not helicopters, unless studying avionics, of course) until they are a lot older.