To ask if you work in a university have you noticed a recent change in student behaviour?

[0987ghj]

I graduated from university in 2019, and have now returned to study a different course. I've noticed a big difference in student behaviour and I wondered if it's something that university staff have also noticed or if it's just my course.

I'm hoping that this thread doesn't seem like I'm trying to slate current university students/gen Z. A few of the examples I've seen are from mature students, so I don't think it's generational/an age thing.

There's a lot of talking now during lectures, people just talking loudly whilst the lecturer is talking (not even whispering). It's pretty brazen and full on conversations, not just a quick question or comment, and really distracting. People are often late quite a lot, there's routinely a few students who are 40+ minutes late to a 2-hour lecture. I know there are some reasons people may be late such as childcare issues, or traffic or illnesses like IBS that make it hard to leave the house in the mornings so that might just be why, but it's a lot more lateness than I ever saw in my degree before. There would be the occasional person 5-10 minutes late, but not 40+ minutes.

People also start packing up and starting to leave before the lecturer has even finished talking. Our lectures always finish slightly early to allow time to walk to other lectures so there's not really any need for it. I don't remember this happening before, unless it was because the lecture had ran over and even then people would quietly/subtly pack up.

@AfterWeights

Make attendance required.

That works both ways! Unis would have to ensure that all lectures were live and not online/pre-recorded. They'd have to make sure that lecturers actually turned up on time for every lecture and not cancel on a whim, often with no notice, leaving students to just wait around 10/15 and then drift away when they realise the lecturer isn't coming!

Funny how lecturers/unis want to use online and pre-recorded lectures when it suits them, but don't want students to have that same choice!

Interesting thread. Plus easy to see where students get their sense of entitlement going by some of the PP.

There has been a definite change over the last 10 years in UG student’s attitudes to studying in HE, brought about by a range of factors. Many mentioned by others in this thread. Whilst frustrating, I don’t blame the students for their consumerist approach to their learning in HE. It’s the desired outcome from a deliberate strategy by the conservative government to manipulate students (and their parents) into viewing HE in a particular way.

That is, HE is no longer seen as a public good, but rather a private good to be bought and paid with requisite entitlements of customer as king. Having students/parents think this way enabled the govt to reduce its responsibility for HE i.e. as a public good with public funding, shift the funding onto the student and load them up with personal debt. All thanks to the Brown review.

The creation of OfS, moving HE under the CMA and the plethora of ranking guides all a part of that very conscious strategy. Add in SMT’s unhealthy obsession with the NSS, student experience and student voice, the influence of social media, an obsession with rating/ranking everything and ultimately, none of this is good for the student nor for the individual faculty. Rishi Sunak’s latest narrow view of the purpose of HE is just another depressing reminder of how our politicians do not understand its purpose.

Having said all that 😏this year so far I’ve found a lot of the students quite engaged with their learning and showing up to lectures again. Which is great.

Agree it's a real shift but this year's cohort feels better. As for lecturers not turning up- I've never heard of it! But in many unis the admin has effectively collapsed. Partly because admin staff are working in isolation at home and meetings are all online so the connective understandings between academics and administrators are broken.

I don’t work in a university but did go back as a mature student a couple of years ago. I was absolutely astounded by the behaviour of so many students. Eating loudly, texting, talking over the lecturers, walking in late and everyone else having to wait for them to settle down, complaining about the workload.
My particular course (teaching) had an attendance requirement and when it came to graduation there were several missing because, as it turned out, they hadn’t turned up enough to make the grade. Maybe it’s because I was a lot older and didn’t have time to dick about, but I couldn’t understand how they would justify the cost of the course to just not bother.
The only plus side to it was that presumably, they’re not now teaching the next generation to be the same.

@FindingMeno

I am shocked at the lack of organisation. Little information filters through and often lectures are different to the one they have been told to prepare for. She has to search for every nugget of information.

Sadly, my son's experience too. Some of the lectures he had bore no resemblance at all to the accompanying notes/slides that were provided beforehand. Same topic, but completely different in structure, order, etc. Same with sample questions in tutorials and weekly tasks etc - nothing at all like the content of the lectures. Some modules were very disjointed and haphazard which made learning the subject matter very difficult and needed a huge amount of "self teaching" to make sense of it all. Seemed to happen a lot when the lectures were being delivered by "someone else" rather than the writer of the lecture notes/slides/questions etc - maybe because the writer had left or on a sabbatical or whatever, and the person actually giving the lecture was working with their own material and not with the notes provided to the students??

Whilst I appreciate that every university is different, I'm fed up of seeing posts about online lectures.

For myself (and actually my colleagues and friends who taught across a number of universities in my part of the country);

All learning went online from March 2020 until the end of the Academic year. Which for my course was the end of April 2020. That's the only time all learning was delivered online. Just over two months.

From September 2020, we did socially distanced hybrid learning at my old place of work, at my current place of work they did entirely face to face (except for when two huge outbreaks caused the course to shut down temporarily). At my old workplace, all seminars and small groups were in person and tutor led with windows open, 2m distance, masks except most students declared
themselves exempt and extra hygiene methods, most individual tutorials were online and most of the huge lecturers were online although at first we had to split the year group into bubbles, repeat the lectures several times and deep clean and air the room in between but this was unsustainable. The university insisted we did 70% of teaching face to face as we were a practical course. As soon as the government advice changed from "work from home" to "work from home if you can" we were in, in person,
even though we were in a Tier 3 area. It was a nightmare to carry out as staff kept catching covid from the students (who'd often attend knowing they had covid or symptoms of covid) or contact tracing would essentially shut down the course for a while. But we were not teaching "entirely online for years" as people often make out.

This is now the 3rd full Academic year that learning has been completely back to normal, ie 100% face to face.

Ironically, attendance was far better when it was hybrid or online, possibly because we were all in lockdown and there was nothing better to do.

Exactly this

Yes, I think if the students are expected to be present, then the teaching, administrative and management staff need to be present on campus too! Otherwise it breaks the links and makes communication/organisation etc a lot more difficult.

I really don't think WFH is the golden bullet that the advocates claim it to be. It may be beneficial for staff who avoid commuting time/cost, childcare issues, etc., but I really don't think it benefits the organisation (and their paying customers)!

Both DCs are at uni and take it v seriously. At my DD’s uni they need to let them know if they can’t attend as it’s a small uni which is more like a college. They keep a good eye on them.
DS is at a regular big uni and despite massive challenges this term has missed one practical as was ill. He is v conscientious- I can’t speak for any other students though. He hasn’t complained about other students’ behaviour - they’re prob all a bit swotty due to nature of degree!!

@All2Well

All learning went online from March 2020 until the end of the Academic year. Which for my course was the end of April 2020. That's the only timeall learning was delivered online. Just over two months.

With respect, that was YOUR university, not all. My son's university didn't do a single "in person" lecture, seminar nor tutorial for the entire 20/21 academic year for his course. Everything was online, lecturers were at home. Whole academic blocks on campus were locked to students for months on end.

It sounds as if your university was the exception, not the norm.

I used to work in association with a university as a researcher.

Some students were appointed to be paid to produce some articles to appear in a journal I was editing (a great opportunity!).

Two of them simply didn’t write anything.

One just said ‘I forgot’.

I was flabbergasted!

I'm a lecturer and I can't say I've noticed these things, but I think the sorts of students I work with are probably different than the 'norm' across all universities. I mostly teach postgraduate students, but the undergrads I teach are all medical students - so I think they are, on average, quite high achieving and competitive.

What we have seen though is significantly higher rates of illness, poor mental health, burnout, and we are needing to give lots more extensions for assessments now than pre-COVID. This isn't at all surprising though.

It's the same with university staff. Our occupational health office is on their knees dealing with staff who cannot work their contracted hours, so on sick leave or phased working. Everyone is playing catch up and completely burnt out. This no doubt leaving very little room for dealing with students when they need support too. So where students who are struggling used to be able to come to us for extra support and pastoral care, we can now do only the bare minimum, if even that. Because we are drowning ourselves. There is no real infrastructure, even at my Russell Group, very well funded university, for supporting student wellbeing. We have like an online service we can refer them to, which offers a bit of online counselling and online CBT, otherwise, we just have to tell them to contact their GP. And we all know how tough that has been.

It's not new. It has nothing to do with increased cost of living or covid and it's really distracting for the majority of students who actually want to be there. It was like this when I was doing a graduate entry medicine degree several years ago. It's unfortunately a minority of adults who have never been challenged for entitled, bratty behaviour and still behave like petulant teenagers. My 5 year old is given a stern talking to if she is acting rude towards someone who's sharing their time and wisdom with her. There's no excuses for grown adults to act that way especially when there's no obligation for them to be there. They can go into the real world and work if they don't want to listen to someone share information about their chosen subject. If I was running the university I'd allow lecturers to lock the door 5 minutes after it starts and kick anyone out who's being disruptive. If you act like a spoilt child you need to be treated like one

When I did my nursing degree yes we had a lot of contact hours but it certainly wasn't on 'any random thing', although some students did lack understanding of how certain things linked to nursing - often the ones that were late/talking! Having said that nursing courses vary so much, so yours may have not been very good.

I'm honestly not seeing any of this behaviour at all, my students are great

Perhaps it's because of the course, it's not oxbridge but it's a highly sought after course at a big London uni, lots of international students paying through the nose to be there so they are very studious. But some colleagues do complain about students so that can't be all of it.

I think respect is a two-way street. I can't imagine yelling at a student for being 5 minutes late, how precious do you have to be. As long as people come in quietly, no problem. I learn people's names and how to pronounce them correctly. I tell them it's ok to miss class if they're unwell, just let me know. I put a lot of work into my lectures and make them engaging, I bring in student discussion. I support them in their struggle with uni admin, they really are treated shoddily a lot of the time.

I have no issues with classroom behaviour and high attendance, maybe I'm just lucky but what I hear from my students a lot is that I actually seem to care about them and their learning, I think that has a lot to do with it. Unlike some of my colleagues who are giving the same lectures and readings for 20 years and clearly can't be bothered with students at all, then they wonder why no one comes to class.

I don’t really understand the idea of feeling entitled because they are paying for the course. Ds feels that because he’s paying he needs to put in more effort, not less, or he is wasting his money. He caught a dreadful virus a few weeks back, ending up in bed for a few days. As soon as he could, he worked hard to catch up the sessions he’d missed. (They don’t put the lectures online, but they do upload the slides/power-points.) A couple of other students told him not to bother as “they’ll never know if you don’t”. That made zero sense to him.

He delayed entry, so is a couple of years older than many of his student peer group, maybe that’s the difference. He’s already had to turn up for work on time every day, in a job he hated, where he was treated badly and he wants to succeed on his course so he can find something better once he’s qualified.

Also, re poor public transport and having to travel in, to some extent I understand this as there will inevitably be occasions where transport causes delays beyond a student’s control, but again, it’s all about personal responsibility. Ds has a long commute, so he goes in a an hour early to make sure he’s not late. Depending on the day and his timetable he either goes and has breakfast on campus before his 9 am starts or goes to the library or a study pod if later in the day.

As for talking over his tutor/lecturer, even without the fact he needs to listen as actually wants to learn, he knows better. It’s just plain rude and disrespectful and he’s not a child.

I'm sad to see some very ablist posts on here with regard to student mental health.

No you can't just take an online quiz and get a personal support plan, at least not at any uni I know of. You need to show written evidence from a medical professional.

It's well documented that the mental heath of young people was very badly affected during Covid, we just have to accept this and try to support them and hope things get better over time.

As for what will they do in the workplace, well at my husband's workplace they have a huge number of staff signed off long-term, mostly for mental health reasons, and national stats say this is happening all over. So our young people will just do what their elders are already doing apparently.

In my School, university restructuring has meant that we've lost nearly all of our admin/professional services staff. The university management people came in after COVID and did some analysis with leadership consultants and decided that the best way to support professional services career development was to encourage secondments and more experience in new areas outside of where they were currently working, so basically re-deployed everyone but without providing the funding to replace them. So all our trusted amazing admins were basically sent off somewhere and we don't really have anyone to do all that work anymore. So it's just putting out fires and admin tasks have gone onto research and teaching staff who frankly have no capacity to be managing email lists of students or creating spreadsheets of student attendance or doing room assignments.

And god, room assignments - don't get me started there. The university gave up a lot of physical space during COVID because teaching was online for a year. But then when they demanded teaching returned to f2f or hybrid, they'd shifted their physical estates so much that there were no longer rooms to book for lectures. We're an urban campus and we do have dedicated university buildings but a lot of teaching is in other places (rented, not university owned). So it's now so difficult to actually get a place to teach in that will fit all your students. And even worse without admin staff who know how to shuffle through the booking system.

A friend of mine has been a lecturer / studio tutor at Uni for about 15/20 years.
He said students are not as independently minded as they were in the late 80s early 90s ( when we went. )
Lots of spoon feeding.

So for example
Say students are doing a project. They work without research, don’t know where the library is and it doesn’t even occur to them to look or indeed how to find stuff out.

He will ask how they have come up with a particular solution and the solution will not be based on any method, president etc.
Architecture undergrad and postgrad tutor.

@ErroneousEntity your DS sounds like he’ll do well. It is puzzling that students pay such high fees and then don’t attend lectures or put the work in. Definitely being even just a few years older helps going into university and students who do a year abroad are so much more disciplined and engaged when they return.

And despite all the criticisms of contemporary students, I am reassured to know that lecturers have always complained e.g. 14th C. scholar Álvaro Pelayo wrote “They attend classes but make no effort to learn anything….The expense money which they have from their parents or churches they spend in taverns, conviviality, games and other superfluities, and so they return home empty, without knowledge, conscience, or money.”

We also have an absolutely massive - like unbelievably massive - increase in students with mental health problems, which I suppose goes alongside the Covid theory.

Yes @Judystilldreamsofhorses but I'm not sure it's down to COVID. This was happening before C-19; COVID has exacerbated it. For me, it's the pathologising & medicalising of the ordinary difficulties of growing up. And I think that a lot of parents have indulged this, because it's another way to try to give advantage to their DC in a competitive world. And there is a significant parent lobby which is now trying to pass the responsibility for raising their DC onto universities.

I don't think it actually helps young people to infantilise them; a lot of things that students think they need, are not actually helping them. Endless extensions and mitigations for example, don't help them: the work has to be done at some point.

I'm laughing slightly at the shocked responses from some posters to the now-ordinary behaviour in lectures etc. I'm not a teacher, I'm a lecturer - I don't do discipline - tat's not my job. I will ask students who are talking while I'm speaking to be quiet because it disturbs their neighbours, and those who actually want to listen. And if I need to do this more than once per lecture, I do suggest that no-one's forcing them to be at university: it's not compulsory.

But I'm not spending my time policing them for phones or eating or whatever. If they haven't learnt this sort of basic behaviour (good manners & consideration for others) from their parents by the time they go to university, it's a waste of my time (and that of my other students) to try to police it. That's not my job.

This happened when “students” became “paying customers”. Suddenly they think they can behave how they like and are entitled to pass because they’ve paid.

Students aren't even getting enough money to cover rent and most cant rely on the bank of mum and dad as everyone is currently suffering financially, lectures and university resources aren't worth nearly ten grand a year and students feel like student housing and universities are exploiting students.

I remember my friends & I getting an absolutely bollocking by a lecturer for talking in a lecture, late 1990s. Quite rightly he tore a strip off us!

What may have happened in the 5yrs since you were last at University @0987ghj is that you’ve matured & therefore notice other people rule breaking & immature behaviour that once you’ve been in the world of work you just wouldn’t do.

With respect, that was YOUR university, not all. My son's university didn't do a single "in person" lecture, seminar nor tutorial for the entire 20/21 academic year for his course. Everything was online, lecturers were at home. Whole academic blocks on campus were locked to students for months on end.

Oh, this old "blame the lecturers for COVID" thing.

For quite a lot of that time, it was actually illegal to teach in person. And lecturers are human beings, often with underlying health conditions which made teaching in-person, in crowded rooms, with young people who were often behaving in complete contravention of COVID regulations, quite dodgy. I live close to a studenty area in my university town, and I saw & heard the house parties that students had, all through the COVID period, which regularly broke the household & gathering inside regs of the time. What healthy 20 year olds decide to do with their health is one thing; but they were reckless abut other people's health.

We returned to in-person teaching as soon as we could at my university, but I had several students who opted out of in-person teaching because they were vulnerable or even CEV, and they found that other students did not give a flying fig for the impact of their behaviour on others' health.

So there were very good reasons for delivery online throughout that period.