£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

Universities didn't get any more money with higher fees. Government funding cuts cancelled that out.

Bollocks Albert. I was working in University funding at the time fees came in.

And in any case, if you charge the user more, they are going to make higher demands on the provider, whether or not the provider is receiving more overall or not. Sure as the sun rises in the morning. Entirely predictable.

They didn't seem quite as strenuous in their opposition to fees as they were in the rounds of salary negotiations going on at the same time Chipmunk.

Data protection is simply not true, in sixth forms parents communicate exactly the same at age 16, 17 , 18 and even 19.
They are telephoned or emailed if students doesn't turn up to class etc,

Hes an adult of course the unincant talk to you.

And surely it would be more professional to devise a satisfactory way to actually deal with these parental complaints "Chipmunk" rather than just say "not our fault and my salary isn't high enough".

Most professional people do encounter having to increase customer satisfaction in situations where they do not have control over every pertinent pricing decision.

The OP only wanted to get involved because her DS wanted her to. If he is an adult then surely that's his decision.

Obviously parents shouldn't usually have any dealings with a Uni but if they specifically want a parent to accompany them to what might be a very important meeting then it seem odd to refuse permission. Especially if a Uni would allow a friend or student rep.

Not at my DDs school in Scotland, we had to attend hastily arranged meeting on the last day of school when she was 15, as she refused to give the school permission to talk to us when she became 16.
After that all letters etc were sent to her and all decisions were hers. It was an interesting year for us all.

Yes forgot kids are 16 in Scotland, bizare.

DS2 has just started his A levels, he's a July birth so not been 16 that long. Other than a brief meeting with the SENCO to tell me what support had been discussed with my son I have had zero input into anything, and at this point I wouldn't expect to. I can partly get the point about aprents paying fees, but that's their choice, you could also choose to let your child get a job and work and study, or just teach them to live on beans and lentil soup! It's not the university's job to consider this, they deal with the student.
That being said I find it very odd that there is a refusal to talk with the student's permission, as you quite rightly say in most workplace issues a friend can be present in a meeting for example. I wonder what has led to this decission?

op Would it not be more germane to actually have a conversation with your son as to why he is in this situation rather than huffing and puffing about whether university will talk to you or not.

I really don't actually know what you want to discuss. Do you want to plead his case that he should be allowed to progress? This isn't an option as he failed to make the criteria laid out in advance.

Whatever sessions he makes from this point onwards need to take into account of this reality. The university cannot make that decision whether it is worth his while persisting with this course of study. He needs to make that decision himself - possibly with support from you and then let the university decide what happens from there.

Have you actually talked to him about why he is performing so badly? To be honest, the bar is usually set pretty low in terms of the mark needed to pass the year. Is he struggling with the work? Has he picked the wrong subject? Has he been having problems socially? Is he struggling with physical or mental health problems? Are the university offering support for any additional needs he might have? Or has he just been lazy or partied for a year and then tried to wing it?

There is nothing stopping you having that conversation with your son.

HelloOrchidaceous,

I was being a little glib, fair enough, but fees were balanced out by cuts. This from a from a Parliamentary research paper: 'The responsibility for funding teaching in England has been shifted further away from the public sector towards the individual (graduate). The financial impact on the sector as a whole need not be negative if they can raise enough through additional tuition fees (backed by publicly subsidised loans). '

Other than that, what Chipmunk said.

It seems to me that a big part of the issue is the housing crunch.
His choices wouldn't be so difficult if he hadn't had to commit to a flat in order to secure one without even knowing if he would need it.

I do however feel that the uni should be responsible for their students, that After Sales Care I mentioned. I hope that my ds is supported to make the right decisions for him.

As an adult, it's his responsibility not to make assumptions about modules, resit, making up credits, etc., and to get fully acquainted with the requirements. He is also expected to be proactive and to seek out support for himself if he is in danger of failing in the first place, and then of failing the resit. I don't know what university your DS attends, but most offer both academic advice and pastoral support.

When your DS was choosing universities to apply to, he should have checked the sort of support that was offered by those universities he was interested in, and at that point you could also have checked.

It's your son's responsibility to know the rules and regulations inside out. I'd be very surprised if he didn't know them as he will have been taught them and they would have been in his course handbook. We do not hide important rules about progression.

No, we don't have meetings with parents. Your child is an adult and bears responsibility for his actions. Tell him to take up the rented room, and get a job so he can save towards next year's fees. This might be the making of him, and he'll leave university with a year's valuable work experience under his belt.

If it makes you feel better, we've just paid our second annual $50,000 bill and I have never spoken to any of my sons lecturers. It's their course. Not ours.

I also worked in a uni during the funding cuts.

We used to get £3500 from the student and £3500 from the government to teach = £7000.
After the fees went up we got £9000 which was top sliced by the government to the tune of £1500 = £7500.

So the fee rise went up for the student by £5500 but we only got another £500 to teach with, in our case all spent on updating facilities.

And surely data protection covers the storage and processing of electronic records. What we're talking about here is consent.

And surely data protection covers the storage and processing of electronic records. What we're talking about here is consent.

Data protection covers all records/personal data, regardless of how it is stored. Data protection is therefore relevant to the question, but the data protection rules allow sharing with third parties if appropriate consent is in place.

Someone suggested that there would be problems of information was revealed in the meeting that the student didn't want to share. I think that all depends on the nature of the consent that the student has given - it would need to be quite comprehensive in my view.

I think the customer service of unis can be dire. I recently did a module at a well known admired uni and quite frankly the administration was awful. Very difficult to find I'd passed, tutor didn't seem to want to tell me, I had and passed well. Now I'm an adult well used to looking at regs etc. Goodness help the young student!

I do data protection law. If a student consents then it is lawful for the university to communicate with the student. HOw much parental input a student wants or needs varies. I have had 3 at university and only one really wanted any input from me at all - it depends on the child's personality and if it's something the parent can help with.

"Data protection is simply not true, in sixth forms parents communicate exactly the same at age 16, 17 , 18 and even 19.
They are telephoned or emailed if students doesn't turn up to class etc"
As to the above it does vary. I gave a DP course once and someone from a sixth form college said they were not even allowed to call a parent so say 16 year old Johnny had not decided to turn up at college today. Of course they were wrong in the sense that had Johnny given consent then the parents could be told so it can certainly easily be set up to enable it but I doubt many of those at universities want too much parental intervention so they are not rushing to obtain those consents.

When students sign up universities could easily have a box - tick here if you want us to communicate with your parents about XYZ and put their email address below. I am about to incur fees, rents and support of £48,600 per year (for the twins) from next year for at least 3 years (they will not take loans) - £145,800 (more if they go to Scotland). If I am going to spend £145k I certainly have a vested interest in knowing if the twins have chosen not to attend or have cut their wrists on the floor of their room.

That said I have very independent children and I certanily won't be interfering at all.

By the way for anyone interested from 2018 when it comes in the new data protection law (GDPR) age 16 will be the age children decide on how their data is handled (unless the UK decides to move it to say 13 which i think is the default current age limit). I hope we do opt for age 13 instead and that would be consistent with US law too. It will affect if you are allowed to embarrass your young teenagers by posting their photos without consent all over your social media pages. Poor children.

I do think unis should smarten up their act, just as think schools have had to in recent years. At my DDs uni, she had no idea when she would find out she had passed the year ( normal exams not resits) and the uni website with all the regulations published did not help. I think there does need to be a timetable so people can plan to. We knew when we were at uni years ago as we were all there to see the results being put up. It was possible then...

It's not uni policy it is the law.

And I doubt very much your son has only just found out he cannot go back this year. He will have been given the regulations about his course at the start.

And he probably needs to resit the exam to be allowed to continue his course, it will not be an automatic entry to the next year without a pass.

Totally crazy that your son can't have a meeting and bring whoever he likes into it, for support.

I can't think of another scenario where that would happen.

If it was just you on your own, the data protection issue would make sense, but it isn't. Ridiculous.

Also, sorry about all the knobbish replies you've had.