To think the government should not have let universities go back

[strawberrysandpecans]

If it knew already from modelling what would happen with Unis it should have made teaching online the first term and saved students the accommodation fees. Government should have subsidised Unis for these for a term and then see where we are after that.

I wonder how many students would have deferred their places for a year if it had been spelt out: "we'll put you into a shared flat with 5 strangers, and even if you don't get on with them, or they form a clique with you excluded, you will be able to socialise with no-one else, and you will have to sleep there every night for the next year without even coming home for Christmas".

Teaching is online...

I have 2 face to face lectures for the first 4 months.

It’s madness, only one thing was going to happen. Most lectures can easily be done online and freshers events can’t happen, so what’s the point of them being there? I feel for such young adults being stuck in their rooms all alone and worry that there will be an explosion of mental health (how do you spell the pleural of crisis? 🙈).

@ScarMatty

Teaching is online...

I have 2 face to face lectures for the first 4 months.

This isn't the case across the board .... certainly not yet.

I'm teaching 60% of my course f2f until the government tells me otherwise

No, if they hadn't this forum would be full of threads about conspiracy theories or the disgrace in not letting young people continue their education, etc etc etc because, not least because at the point the decision would have been needed there wouldn't have been the numbers of positive tests we're seeing now. It would have been pegged as a huge overreaction.

I do think they should now allow students to return home and study remotely now if they'd prefer, students shouldn't feel trapped at uni.

In the US it's been up to each university to decide. DS is back taking in person classes but with other restrictions and DD is fully remote and doing uni in her bedroom. So far, DS's uni has not had a significant number of cases (just 4 I think). Everyone is getting tested weekly.

I wonder how many students would have deferred their places for a year if it had been spelt out: "we'll put you into a shared flat with 5 strangers, and even if you don't get on with them, or they form a clique with you excluded, you will be able to socialise with no-one else, and you will have to sleep there every night for the next year without even coming home for Christmas".

Yes. I feel like they've been conned

I do think they should now allow students to return home and study remotely now if they'd prefer, students shouldn't feel trapped at uni.

They should but 1. it's too late they've already all mixed and 2. they will lose the term's rent and that's not cheap, sometimes including food they've paid for if catered.

My daughter signed her rent agreement in Jan for her 2nd year . It isn’t possible to cancel the rent agreement so off she went .Its disgraceful how the students have been treated at this rate lots will drop out

Some Universities in the UK said in early May they couldn't foresee reopening fully til Jan 2021, and that student welfare could be compromised if Universities were forced to open.

If I had a University-age DC this year I'd have likely suggested they defer for a year because this was entirely predictable.

We are all entitled to our opinions but I think it was the lesser of two evils and University being 100% virtual for the entire first term would cause more problems than it would solve.

It is inevitable that covid will go through the student population at a rate whenever they go back so in my mind it is better for that to happen now than at the start of the next term in January when hospitals will be subject to their usual winter pressures as well as everything else.

The vast majority of students will only have minor symptoms

Isn't this another example of the Government failing to involve relevant organisations in their discussions? The same thing that caused the exam result problems.

I'm sure that the Government must have anticipated what they might do if/when a second wave started. It wouldn't have taken much for them to speak to Universities over the Summer and together plan a co-ordinated approach. It wouldn't have taken much for Universities to tell students whether they expected to have face to face lectures, advise them to stay at home to access online lectures etc for a while and then bring them back when things are safer. It would even have been possible for students to return in smaller groups (ie certain courses/year groups first) to test how a return was working.

But what we got was a Government encouraging everyone to get back to work, go out, get on with things as normal. Now we have lots of young people, some who have never lived away from their parents before, told that they have to stay in their room, not mix with others, not go home, not have family to visit and rack up huge debts to do so.

Rather than blaming young people for spreading the disease I think we should give them huge credit for obeying any of the rules when they have so clearly been a second thought.

(By the way, I am not young and not a student)

Pretty hard to do biology labs over a web cam
and its biology labs that will get us out of this mess

Google tells me that there are 130 universities in UK.
The one I work for is looking at extra £25 million debt just from the Lockdown we already had (& loss of international students going forward).

So if govt were to subsidise that loss of income from accommodation alone, I'm thinking that could be £10million each Uni each term. x 130.

Maybe £1.3 billion, 3x a year, is a drop in the ocean for govt budget.
Google says there are 30.3 million tax payers in UK.
So a mere £43 each tax payer each deferred term. Is paying that ok with your household, OP?

And no practical learning, no nurses learning about anatomy from things with actual anatomy or biologists doing dissection or chemists mixing potions or engineers making stuff. Hopefully not important.

Dunno how far out my math is, tbf.

The thing is in that case EhUp they shouldn't be confining to their rooms and threatening to kick them out of uni if they mix outside their bubble, or banning them from going to the pub. It either should have been let it spread through the uni population (and that would've given them the choice of whether to defer) or just do first term online. What's happening now is a kind of imprisonment of students at vast cost which could have severe MH impacts.

at this rate lots will drop out
I agree Reallyhow122 perhaps the government doesn't care though so long as they've paid up, or that's how it seems.

cleverknot it's far from ideal but given how much the government has wasted lately eg on the app which didn't work or the dodgy contracts handed out etc I'd be okay with it yes

DS has been at uni a fortnight. He knew it would be mostly online lectures for the first term but, at 21, he was looking forward to getting on with life as an adult. And so, he's introduced himself to everybody, has contracted COVID and is halfway though his isolation. This is the population that has to drive herd immunity for everyone older and vulnerable. A scant few will be seriously ill, but most will be like DS who had a fever for 12 hours, coughed for 48 and is now feeling perky again.

And yes, it's absolutely the rational decision to study and improve your education during a period of (what will be) huge job loss. DS will graduate (we hope) in 2024, by which time the world will be on the way back to normal.

I'm sure I read an article in the Guardian several months ago where some students reported that their Unis had them over a barrel - with the unis saying that classes would be likely online for at least the first semester and that if the students had accepted their place already they couldn't use this as a reason to defer, so they would lose their place if they didn't want to start their course online. And, if they took up their place they still had to sign up for their accommodation and pay rent, and go there..for online lectures.
Sure there was something written by the bbc as well about this at that time too.

Only 1/3 of students are freshers .....

returning students will have signed their accommodation contracts months ago
and cannot defer as they are already registered

I think it was right to allow the students back; they can use the oceans of time to do something useful, I.e study. Most of the things they would do instead of studying are unavailable to them: travelling, working (in that there’s much less casual work available). But, the government and the universities should have been MUCH more clear about what the reality was going to be, so they had the option to defer, instead of conning the students into paying and staying as they have done.

Remember this at the ballot box, students.

I think people imagining that students can happily just study at home are probably not considering the huge numbers who can't. Some will be because of their course, some will have rubbish or no broadband at home, some will be in overcrowded homes with no quiet space to study.

They are young adults who need to be moving on with the next part of their lives. This term will be tough, but until there is a vaccine, as soon as you put students together it would spread. How long do we delay that for? What if there's no vaccine next year?

@SueEllenMishke

I definitely think you're in the minority unfortunately

[quote ScarMatty]@SueEllenMishke

I definitely think you're in the minority unfortunately[/quote]
I'm really not.

My whole university is delivering at least 50% and other universities are doing the same.

I think we will start to see more move online but the intention was definitely to deliver some f2f teaching to the vast majority students.

I think both universities and the government should have been more honest with students about what the reality was likely to be.

And I think locking them in their halls is disgusting and unlawful.

@ScarMatty

Teaching is online...

I have 2 face to face lectures for the first 4 months.

That is not the case everywhere. I am delivering all my teaching f2f.

My uni in Scotland is delivering my whole course online for the semester and so are other some other unis here. Maybe it depends on the course