Making accommodations isn't always 'kind' (uni)

[Jourdain11]

I'm interested in knowing general opinions on this. I would accept that the last few years have been tough for students, and UG finalists in particular have had their full course horribly disrupted. But I am struck by how the accommodations made for students have really not helped them, in a large proportion of cases. I work in a uni (London Russell Group, competitive and highly-rated) and the number of students who have requested deferrals and so on for MH reasons is huge. In my role, I pushed back a bit and said that we shouldn't be advocating this as a way of dealing with any level of pressure and anxiety. In some cases it was absolutely necessary, but in others I felt that it was just becoming a pattern or a way of buying more time.

Ultimately, in the careers many of these graduates will go on to have, they will have to work to deadlines and deal with pressure, and part of the uni experience is providing preparation for that.

We now have students who are very upset because they cannot graduate with their peers, who are very anxious because they've deferred half their year's assessments to a one-werk resits period and feel they will not cope, or who are just disappointed that they haven't completed the year and have uncertainty as regards progression. Plus those who have now come to see assessment as an absolutely terrifying and insurmountable thing because we have agreed that they clearly weren't capable of sitting their exams, when they probably were.

Overall, I feel that we need to be encouraging coping strategies and empowering students, rather than encouraging them to opt out on the most tenuous rationale. But some of my colleagues would consider this to be virtually heresy and I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this place we have found ourselves in.

The more I learn about Kathleen Stock the more ambivalently I view her. But I agree that the article @sparkysdream links to on p12 is good, and thought provoking. (The article in The Critic that KS links to is full of cheap shots and claims of bad practice that I can’t imagine IRL, if only because they would leave the uni open to lawsuits.)

I have no idea if the KS article is true or not. But through personal knowledge of working with them I know one university who has terrible practices that are often illegal. I would not be surprised if they were taken to court.

My DCs have always said that from the start of a course, you can see various tribes forming, and from their priorities, can predict those who will be disruptive/ nerdy/ etc, will be asking for extensions, will be very vocally negative in group comments. This from some courses that are competitive enough to involve surviving interviews that require significant life experiences and skills to even get offered a place. DCs question if they learned to fake how rational adults behave under stress, or had identical siblings who tested or interviewed? Because they sure as hell aren't making good choices in their lives.

Qualifications have to be earned. Perhaps the kindest and best option all round is that they fail, or at least have to resit out of cohort, and decide whether they should do something else? Coping with stressful demands by pleading MH rather than tackling the work just piles up the work, and vicious cycle. The genuinely ill are easily spotted. Many who are ill but not debilitatingly so, press on and get past, heal afterwards. Risky, but self awareness is part of adulthood. I think that the student perspective (party without work tribe excluded) is about the same as the staff one.

My sister works for a uni and says exactly the same!

I came on this thread to agree with OP that overall, we need to stop pathologising teen distress and stress and showing them that it is normal and they can cope and it will pass. But I think some people om this thread are a bit too dismissive of the impact Covid has had. If you are 20, and the first two of your uni years were interrupted by Covid, that's 10% of your entire life and life experience. Or 19 and sat no A levels, had no goodbyes with friends, no celebrations when results came out, arrived at a uni to sit alone in a bedsit and log onto yet another screen, for all tutorials and lectures, with no bar or library to go to, no societies open, it's going to impact heavily on your ability to socialise.

These - late teens, early twenties - are the years when the brain is primed to soak up new experience, learn from mistakes, take risks etc. Instead all teen brains were seriously understimulated for months on end, reliant on dopamine-addictive screen time for hours a day and little else. We may be more resilient because our brains got that stimulation at that crucial time in life, and lockdown was a far tinier percentage of our time on earth - we had loads more experience to draw on.

Except they did not spend two years without friends or socialising.

I literally cannot believe the determination to argue that teenagers and young people have not been put through a highly abnormal period. It just seems mad. Would a shred of empathy cost too much?

Well said @goldfinchonthelawn.

I'm surprised that so many university tutors and lecturers are expected to nursemaid the students so much.

Although DD did request a couple of PECs, which were refused (IMO asking for an extra week for a dissertation when she was laid very low with covid for a week and unable to do any work at all was not unreasonable) and even her dissertation tutor said she should have been granted one, she managed to get her dissertation over the line before the deadline (just).

It seems that DD's university take a much stricter line on marking. She knows some engineering students who scored very badly in one of their third year exams. One student scored 0% and one scored 5%.

So, not all universities give into pressure from the students.

@goldfinchonthelawn I haven't read the whole thread, and the points you make seem fair. The system is there for students genuinely in need, and rightly so. However other students who also faced the same world can easily distinguish the malingers from the ones who need support. And they're the same age. And @antelopevalley is right, they didn't spend the last 2 years without friends or socialising, there's a tendency from certain tribes to play the system, and they also tend to be disruptive during the course, so there is little sympathy for them, and are called out in course chats. There's no shortage of camaraderie for those genuinely in need.

@maryso and others, sometimes students with the greatest MH needs are the most reluctant to access help. This becomes really difficult for everyone.

@TullyApplebottom I don’t see anyone denying that today’s student’s have been through very bad times. My uni is not alone in having let them down. But this sits side by side with the fact that staff during those times were on their knees from overwork. This thread hasn’t acknowledged that. The idea that academic staff let students down is largely wrong. Mostly lapsed infrastructure, poor central planning, etc were the culprits. Also just an impossible situation. @CoffeeWithCheese posted pretty typical experiences.

@goldfinchonthelawn makes an excellent point about the developing brain and how it may link to resilience. The brain is very sensitive in the late teen years. But comparing Covid to a war experience is obscene. PTSD, amputation and other life changing injuries, starvation and violent death on a large scale, anyone? (Obviously we had deaths, but violent ones are a different category.)

...or taking a whole day off for a telephone GP appointment

Sorry, just diverting back to this for a moment. Early last year, when schools were only open physically to key workers' and vulnerable DC, DS2 got himself a telephone GP appointment. When he just said 'It's on Wednesday the week after next', I naïvely thought that he had forgotten at what time. But no, 'Wednesday the week after next' was literally his appointment. So had he actually been in school, his phone could have rung when he was in transit there or back (discuss your medical issues at the side of a busy road, anyone?), or in a lesson (assuming that the teachers would have agreed for him to keep his phone on - probably, to be fair - and that he had remembered to ask and not just turned it off automatically), or - as it eventually did, at 6.45 in the evening.

(Previous appointments - the old-fashioned, tip up to the waiting room a few minutes early, get called in at some time usually fairly close to the arranged one, speak to someone in the flesh for a few minutes variety - on a school day had involved being a little late in, leaving a little early, or walking / being taken to the surgery at some point after coming home...).

Armed with that experience, had he needed to make another appointment once he was back in school, I might well have suggested that he took the day off for it.

But, you know, they got to travel so they were better off than young people during Covid.

Never mind that they never came home from their 'travels'.

MarchingFrogs, imagine what it's like for teachers!

There’s also an odd thing that one of the PPs mentioned where they will spend a LONG time on work. Way longer than needed or asked for. And yet the work is still often of noticeably poorer quality than previous years

Flicking over to social media? But on the other hand that must have been an enormous time-waster for a decade now.

I see a lot of empathy on this thread. What everyone here wants is for students to succeed and thrive. Encouraging them to feel really bad isn't true empathy at all: it's disempowerment, irresponsible, and potentially quite horrible in its effects.

There are some earlier comments (not, I think, from you) about how it's not surprising that university students know they have bleak prospects. Well, in an inversion of that over-used comment by Aristotle about young people's poor morals, it's also true that the young of every generation think they have it uniquely bad compared to their elders. The truth is that every generation has its own unique challenges. Furthermore, every generation has to make its own way in the world, and it does look daunting at the start.

I think it's helpful for anyone who is having a bad time to remember that anyone around them of any age may have their own bad stuff going on, and while we should also treat eachother with kindness, we also have to take courage and continue.

Keep calm and carry on, if you like, but I think the UK began to repudiate that way of being years ago.

@poetryandwine - I didn't compare Covid to the war experience? Was that a refernece to another post in a paragraph that tagged me?

I also think it is possible to be empathetic about their experience and to try ands grasp the impact it has had on their generation without infantilising them in the process.

@goldfinchonthelawn I apologise. I should have started a new paragraph to disassociate that comment from you. The comparison was attempted some while back.

I agree we can be empathetic without infantilising students, also. @TomPinch is right that encouraging students to wallow (and making too many concessions, although my standard for that is not on the strict side) is disempowering.

You do realise that not all students are drug taking, alcoholic party animals don't you? It's quite insulting to the large proportion of students who aren't interested in that lifestyle!

My son only made friends with only a handful of flat mates in campus accommodation in the worst affected covid year 20/21. In that year, for his course, there wasn't a single "in person" lecture, tutorial or seminar and his college common room was kept locked and in darkness - even during the periods between lockdowns, where limited socialising was allowed! They weren't allowed to sit together in the library as desks/tables were separated and adjoining ones were covered in "do not use" notices and hazard tape! He did a couple of "group" tasks but the others in his group weren't on campus (two weren't even in the country) so no "real life" friends from that either!

Yes, there were other students wandering around the campus, but literally the only "get togethers" were based around alcohol, which just isn't his scene. Yes, some students went to pubs/bars (when allowed), and yes, some would "socialise" in eachothers' flats.

But I get quite annoyed at the narrative that suggests all students are obsessed with partying. My son doesn't drink, and luckily a couple of his flat mates weren't "party" animals either, so his flat remained pretty "quiet" throughout the first year.

Luckily, although he's absolutely hated his Uni experience so far, he's kept his sanity and has knuckled down and done the work, and not expected any extensions nor concessions. He's not happy about things, but knows it's a means to an end, and is grateful that he's now done 2 years and only has 1 year left. He certainly won't be looking back with misty eyes and thinking it's been the best years of his life, and hasn't made life long friends!

@Badbadbunny ,

I think @antelopevalley is being very literal in their interpretation of my claim that young people had no socialising for two years. If we're being pedantic, OK, yes, my DC both met up with one friend at a time for walks for months on end, and I think had one illegal freezing cold meet up with their best mates around a firepit in December.

But they missed:
Last Day of School Celebrations
Last Day of Exams celebrations
Results Day celebrations
School Leavers Prom
Prize Day speeches and (I thought rather meanly) actual prizes - they just got a 'you would have won a prize' notification from their school
All friends' 18th birthday parties cancelled, including both of theirs
A major family milestone party cancelled
Loads of small meet ups cancelled due to covid
Several longed-for gigs cancelled
Theatre shows cancelled
2 years of competing in a sport at national level cancelled
Local group meetings of same sport also cancelled
Summer holidays with friends cancelled in UK
Summer holiday with friends cancelled abroad
No Freshers Ball
No Freshers Raves, parties etc
No weekly pizza meet ups with tutor group or Think Tank week in a wilderness lodge, which were some of the things that attracted one DS to his course. the course was famous for its sociable discussions with brilliant tutors. Never happened once, not in two years, having ahppened every week for decades prior to the pandemic.
No year abroad - host uni cancelled it
All uni-linked internships cancelled for two years
No casual jobs in hospitality industry as so many places closed, so thweir chance of getting that first job was delayed
No in-person lectures for two years
No in person seminars for two years
No subject socials for almost two years

@antelopevalley can think they should be fine because they were allowed to drink a coffee on a park bench a few times and had a few get togethers when lockdown restrictions were eased but I think that is a list of massive, formative milestones and to miss out on every bloody one of them has a cumulative effect and makes an impact at that age. For a lot of teens, it could make them feel it's not worth bothering or getting enthusiastic about stuff. As I said, it's 10% of their entire life and 100% of the adult life experience, so of course they are behind in their social skills and adulting. They need a couple of years to catch up and I'm sure they will.

While not questioning that the pandemic and the lockdowns were no joke, I would like note that for some it was fine. I'm in NZ. We had two hard lockdowns, ie, confined to our houses, the first lasting about 6 weeks in 2020 and the second a third of a year in 2021. It honestly wasn't that bad for us and there is no evidence that my children were traumatised by it at all. Juggling work and home-schooling wasn't easy but we managed and we did a lot of nice things at home. I think we had it easier in that between the two lockdowns there were no restrictions at all, other than it being very hard to enter the country - not an issue if you're there. But the lockdowns themselves were very strict and lots of restrictions remained after the second one as Delta wasn't eliminated by it.

My point is that there is a danger in assuming everyone needs to having the bar dropped due to covid, especially at that a young and impressionable age. I worry that there are a lot of students believing they were traumatised simply because they have been told they should be. I've got old, but the 20-year old me would have fallen for that, hook, line and sinker.

But the things you're describing were things that none of us could do.

And I find the underlying blame by some parents on this thread of universities for the "bad" university experience to be unreasonable.

We were following government guidance, and trying to assess best and safe practice to keep your children safe. My university was guided by researchers who were working hard on vaccine research and issues surrounding COVID-19. These people were working for their lives (and ours, literally!) Our Registrar was pulling 18 hour days and juggling managing the education of our undergrads with their safety, that of the staff, AND the genuine and legitimate concerns of the local city's public health authorities about illegal student activities (eg big parties to which police needed to be called to break up ....)

If you feel now - with the benefit of the perfect vision of hindsight - that we were over-cautious, then we were probably doing the right thing, frankly. I have several students affected by post-viral illness ('long COVID') - it's been very difficult for them, and they've appreciated our care & attempts to try to keep people safe. Bitching about things like universities' attempts to maintain social distancing is so unreasonable, I don't know where to start with that, thinking about my CEV students & colleagues, as well as my students who are now CEV because of COVID.

Totally. Half of the education I got in uni was from extra curricular activities.

There are so many life skills that you learn from activities like being involved in the organisation of clubs, student theatre, things like that. The actual coursework is only a portion of it.

"None" of us could do things for very short periods of time. Too many Unis went above and beyond the official lockdowns and restrictions.

My son had absolutely zero "in person" lectures, seminars or tutorial groups for the entire 20/21 academic year. There were times in that year where such things were allowed, but Uni went above and beyond and entire departments were kept locked and in darkness. Eg "in person" was allowed in September and October, before the November 2020 lockdown, but just didn't happen - staff weren't on campus, staff car parks were literally empty.

Why was his Uni college common room locked for the entire 20/21 academic year? Why was the library open very limited hours and only with separated (socially distanced) desks/tables and why were students living together in campus accommodation (sharing kitchens etc), not allowed to sit together in the library to study together?

Why did the campus security break up groups of flat mates simply walking around the campus when they had key fobs to prove they were sharing a flat, i.e. a "household" allowed by law to be together as they were living together?

When Uni restaurants/cafes finally re-opened, why weren't a group of 8 flat mates living together allowed to sit together to have a meal?

Even in the 21/22 academic year, half of DS's modules were still online only - at times when there were no restrictions at all?

Shops didn't close to "protect their staff and customers" from covid! Neither did delivery drivers and the rest of the supply chain logistics, including food factories, wholesalers, etc. The building industry didn't close down for over a year, they carried on making things, delivering things, building things! Even schools were open pretty much as normal for a lot of 20/21 academic year when Unis were basically closed.

As for the "we all suffered the same", no, we really didn't. Adults had a year or two where they couldn't do a few things, but virtually everything they missed can be done later, i.e. holidays, a delayed wedding, etc. But students who missed out on their secondary school prom, doing their A levels, Uni freshers week, at least a years' of in person lectures, Uni clubs/societies, etc., will NEVER get the chance to do those things.

Minimising the impact on students by saying some had parties is ridiculous!

Fully agree, unfortunately, a lot of people just don't "get it" and don't realise what that particular cohorts have missed out on, things that they'll never be able to recreate or do in future years.

Moreoever, they won't have made the lifelong friends or gained the valuable "working together" skills that are pretty much the "norm" from a Uni experience. Being locked in with your flat mates for a year isn't anything like the same experience as having freedom to meet loads of new people in the gym, clubs & societies, tutorial groups, open lectures/talks, or even random meetings in the Uni common rooms, cafes, etc. At Uni everyone is there for the same reasons, so "strangers" have something in common immediately - once they've left Uni, you really don't have the opportunities to make random friends so easily!

Covid took that away from the current cohort, made worse by Unis going way over and beyond the official restrictions, and even worse by them promising "in person" teaching to some extent just to con students into signing campus accommodation contracts, only to then pull the rug from under their feet and tell them the "in person" teaching won't happen after all (and by the way, the library is closed too!).

Half of the education I got in uni was from extra curricular activities.

This may have been true in the old days but in the world of £9250 fees it's indefensible. If you are not paying for extra curricular activities the university has no obligation to provide them.

The content and experience of the actual paid-for course should be sufficient to prepare you for a good job post graduation.