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.

@Badbadbunny Ironically lots of universities have cut their pastoral support as they are struggling financially.
But there is a point where it is reasonable to ask how much support should a university give and when does it mean the person is simply not up to doing a university degree.

I think at 44 you are the generation who have had it the easiest to be honest.

You must* *be joking! All of the work and none of the rewards. Didn’t get into the housing market before the bubble, no job stability, pension collapsing, doing a workload twice the amount of colleagues ten years older, no promotion opportunities, less good work-life balance than those ten years younger, trying to balance boomer parents with small children, huge housing cats. The only thing we do have is that we didn’t have quite as much student debt; but now we are also thought of as the mean old crusty bigots who don’t agree with the new world of pronouns, while all the actual sexist and racist old guard slip under the radar as they coast on their final salary pension promises towards retirement 😂

Being gen X sometimes feels like the generational slice in the middle who gets dumped on by both ends!

But it shouldn’t be a pissing contest between generations. The difference is that students now are displaying huge amounts of unhappiness that seems vastly in excess of the objective reality of their lives. What can be done to change that?

"People are constantly comparing covid to the war. To have even been born during it you’d need to be over 78. To have been an adult during it you’d need to be 96. I’m fairly sure than few of those people are still in the workforce, and as a generational voice they are now few in number. I don’t think it’s a helpful comparison usually, but I DO think it demonstrates universal impact, well. So no, no generation has lived through anything like this in living memory. I don’t think it’s fair to minimise that."
But its not helpful for this generation to think they had it worse,when they didnt.
My DD is 24 both her grandparents lived through the war and she knows about their lives
This generation dont even know how lucky it is to get to go to university in the first place. As said above my MIL education stopped at 12 because of the war, I was talking to my friend whose mother is in her 80s and had a similar story, there is a generation of women who had no education because of WW11
My Father who lived in Cyprus left school at 12.
I was born in the early 60s , very few of my school friends took A levels let alone went to university.

Housing costs not cats! My flat is too small for cats sadly 😂

@theclangersarecoming

I think that not having as full a social life as you would like is definitely bad for mental health.

I think you're drastically minimising the impact if you just think it's about not having a full social life! It was a hell of a lot more than that.

My DS was at uni, he wasn't at home. He was in a campus flat of 8. It was a college system, so they had no "common" area in the flat besides a tiny kitchen as the assumption in colleges is that you "socialise" in the common room.

He went because the Uni promised "as near normal as possible given restrictions" and they were planning for lectures, seminars, etc being at least partly in person.

In reality, none of that happened, even when there weren't lockdowns. The place was deserted except for the students who'd basically been conned into accepting accommodation on the "promise" of there being reasons to be on campus. Common room was closed all year despite it being allowed to be open between the lockdowns. That means no where for DS to go other than his bedroom as the kitchen only had a tiny circular table and 2 chairs (no space for anything else). During the lockdowns, the campus security would herd them back to the accommodation block! They played board games sat on the landing which was the only space big enough for 8 people, but even then, security herded them back into their bedrooms!

I don't think people understand just how badly students were treated at some universities!

No, most generations have lived through worse.

I mean seriously? Staying at home, having everything available online, lots of breaks from the lockdowns as things kept opening up again...this is the worst thing any generation has ever lived through?
Stop it! Stop teaching them that they are poor betrodden victims of the worst thing ever! Ok, some kids mental health took a dip and thats an issue, but to pretend like it was the worst time of any generation ever...it's a joke.

I found the grading algorithm pretty accurate. It accepted my top and bottom grades (range the same as previous verified outcomes).and the ones in the middle went down a grade. I'm afraid my gut reaction was, 'it's a fair cop, algorithm!' Then they all went up again....but I'd deliberately been optimistic expecting moderation down.

What a ridiculous thing it all was.

Not interested in having a pissing contest between generations.
Sorry I thought you would be too young to have been affected by pension collapses, I was wrong. I lost money when my pension collapsed, there was no compensation scheme then.
It was really from 2000 that house prices soared, I lost money in a house I bought and sold before then!
I do not recognise the description of the old guard at all. I guess a different industry.

I left school at 16 like most of my generation of working-class kids. University was not for "the likes of us". The push then was to get kids to stay on until 18.

The pandemic was hard and I am sure young adults are unhappy about its impact. But my point is that a victim focus narrative does not help them. They need to be encouraged to see and take advantage of the opportunities available.

I had three people in my tiny 3-room flat, with two adults each trying to do a 60+ hour Zoom working week from the bedrooms while homeschooling a child, and barely going out of the building for two years! If all I had to do was play board games I would have been laughing!

This was weekends! I'm pretty sure you weren't working 24/7!

WW2 wasn't that long ago in generational terms. I'm not 50 yet and my Mum remembers hiding under the table 'playing bears' (air raid) and my Dad mentioned casually (when I was data gathering for a Golden Wedding speech) that his family were bombed out and the 4 of them had to move in with his aunt and uncle for a year. 8 of them in a 2 bed house.

My DP are prosperous elderly people. You would never know this was in their background. My dad had never spoken of it to me before. He also has damaged feet from lack of shoes and damaged teeth from lack of dentistry.

I don't think 2020 was objectively worse. Maybe differently.

I had three people in my tiny 3-room flat, with two adults each trying to do a 60+ hour Zoom working week from the bedrooms while homeschooling a child, and barely going out of the building for two years! If all I had to do was play board games I would have been laughing!

Exactly! They weren't working 20 hour days on an NHS ward in full PPE. They weren't handling multiple deaths working in aged care homes. They weren't homeschooling several children while trying to do their job. They weren't home with children with special needs whose care had shut down.

They were at university playing board games and fully able to go out, or go home at any time. Cry me a fucking river.

Er…yes? Have you spoken to many academics about their workload? It’s routine to work weekends even in “normal” times, when workload is well over 60 hours/week. During Covid we were pushed to really extend levels of workload above that to keep it all going, with many universities insisting on us running twice the usual teaching sessions - once in person and once online - and no accommodation for homeschooling.

No generation HAS lived though anything remotely like this.

Sorry but that statement is just so historically inaccurate that it’s almost offensive in the ignorance and/or lack of imagination it demonstrates.

My father lost his father in WW2; my grandmother’s generation lost a host of family and friends in WW1

I also think of the 100s of thousands of young gay men who lost their lives to an unknown virus in the 1980s, largely ignored because it was seen as a “gay disease.”

In the globally coordinated battle against the Corona virus, we had pretty effective vaccines within a year.

You've conveniently ignored the "sometimes" in that sentence. Yes SOMETIMES it is needed for people just to do the job that is needed. That sentence came directly after me talking about a receptionist who asked to work from home and only in the office one day a week a an adjustment because of her mental health issues. Obviously that is an adjustment that cannot be made as you can't do reception duties from home. It doesn't fit in the job that is needed. So yes she either does the job needed or finds a new one. Has no one taken a job they realised wasn't for them and left? I tried plenty of jobs in my past and realised they weren't for me at all and were making me really stressed out. I quite like watching medical things and surgery etc on TV. But I know i couldn't do that job as I wouldn't want the risk of someone's life in my hands. (Also probably not clever enough anyway). So I couldn't go for a job doing it then ask for an adjustment that I don't actually do any surgery as it makes me too stressed.
Reasonable adjustments are meant to be just that. Reasonable.

I think we're starting to see why so many students have depression, mental health problems, etc if some of these replies are genuinely from Uni staff! Sounds like some staff really aren't suited to dealing with young adults.

I think that is unfair. The first lockdown especially was hard for lots of people, including university students in some halls.
Near me, though they all seemed to be having lots of parties and lots of fines were dished out.

But I accept the pandemic had a negative impact on university students.

How so? People are rightly pointing out the difference between feeling some stress and actually having a mental health problem.

I’ll raise you ‘My girlfriend had a nightmare’

Yes yes @AtomicBlondeRose, the email bombardment is relentless. When I ran my own business, I had half the number of emails I do now.

I have an allocated time at the end of my class each week where I talk through the upcoming assessments and encourage students to ask questions. I also set up an online forum where they can ask questions, and everyone can see the questions and answers. This is to avoid me having to answer the same question again and again. Despite this, students will email me FIVE MINUTES AFTER CLASS with long lists of questions. It's very disrespectful of my time. They say they are too nervous to speak up/ask questions in class. This concerns me because they will be expected to be assertive and confident in their positions when they graduate. I feel for employers, I really do.

Other times students will use the online forum, but email me directly 'because I didn't respond'. When I check, they will have posted their question 12 hours earlier. They expect, and demand, an immediate response. There is very little respect for my time. Recently I set up an hour long Zoom consultation session for students ahead of the major assignment so they could ask me questions. No one came until five minutes before the scheduled end. Then two students joined and expected me to talk them through long and complex problems.

I remember wanting to make a good impression on my professors. It seems those days are very much gone. I often feel like a 24/7 bot.

Should have quoted the above.

also ‘my mum didn’t wake me up’

I work in a low-paid industry. The young people joining us are not at all like this. I think it is an issue of a certain kind of middle-class student. It is not all young people.

We had a junior member of staff ask his trainer not to use a green highlighter during his supervision sessions as he found that colour pen triggering.

Agree with so many of the posts here- also did not know there was an academic corner, so thanks for that direction.
I too question whether the support is not actually benefiting students in the long run. Academic here at RG and the students just defer/extend because it’s seen as a right to do so, rather than a safety net. It is legitimising and medicalising, in some cases, the everyday vicissitudes of life which need to felt and to be worked through.