DS wants to drop out of Oxford - and it's largely my fault

[Distressedstudent]

My DS is a fresher at Oxford and not enjoying it one bit - the intensive work load, the lack of contact hours, the general 'nerdiness' of it. He had wanted to go to York but, as he was predicted (and got) 4 x A star, we urged him to apply to Oxford (where we went - he had no intention of applying) and then, when he got his offer, to firm it. He very reluctantly agreed after talking to his teachers who said he'd be nuts to turn down Oxford, even though his heart was set on York.

He sees his friends from school having a blast at other universities whereas he has his nose to the grind at Oxford. He is now planning to see his Director of Studies and to see if York will take him from September (to read the same humanities course). He is not interested in my advice as DH and I 'got it wrong' and gave him 'duff advice' (his words).

I am not sure if I am up to replying to anyone kind enough to offer their thoughts because I feel so miserable/disappointed/guilty on his behalf.

Is it possible to first try changing college at Oxford? I have no idea if that’s possible btw. When we visited, there were definitely colleges with more of a fun vibe and others DC would have refused to go to because the student reps seemed so dull. The fun colleges most definitely had social lives although admitted the workload was intense with short terms and tutorials. I’m pretty sure though that he will get more contact hours at Oxford than anywhere else!

My suspicion is it will be more to do with the types of student there. They will have more perfectionists and more neuro diverse students than other universities and so mental health issues are likely to be greater.

@ExeterYork that's an assumption on your part, plus dismissive and insensitive.

Thank goodness Cambridge are looking at it in a more objective way than you and doing some research.

There's an awful lot of unnecessary inverted snobbery/Oxford-bashing on here.

And the OP seems to have had a hard time too - I can't see anywhere where she's said she won't support her son. She's expressing her own misgivings and personal disappointment here in an anonymous space, which is what it's here for.

I went to Oxford (years ago, obviously). I met my DH there. Neither of us has set the world alight career-wise, but we both have well-paid work we largely enjoy. We both had a good time and made some good friends. There's a part of both of us that would love it if one of our kids went there, but we will both be supportive of whatever they decide to do and recognise that it is completely their choice. But if none of them choose it (I think academically it'd be an option for two of the three of them potentially), we'd be allowed a small moment of private regret I think. And I think that could coexist with being excited about whatever they do choose to do.

Oh, OP, I really feel for you. I can relate to both you and your ds.

I studied at Cambridge, but I actually wanted to go to York - fell in love with York at interview, whereas I hated the Cambridge interview experience. Hated the academics, hated their approach, hated the people I met there, hated the public school vibe etc. Didn't expect to get an offer, but when I did, I was determined to turn it down.

My parents put no pressure on me at all, but my Director of Sixth Form was insistent that I should take the Cambridge place. Partly because kids going to Oxbridge from my state comp were few and far between, and partly because he had left Oxford as a student himself and always regretted it. He told me that I would be crazy to turn Cambridge down if I had the opportunity to go there. I respected him, and I took his advice.

I really hated my first term in Cambridge and resolved to leave during the Christmas holiday. My sister persuaded me that lots of people hated their first term and that I should give it a bit longer. I did, and actually, it was totally the right decision for me. I found my niche, I found my people and I gradually started to really enjoy the Cambridge life. I stayed, and I'll be honest - the Cambridge degree on my CV has undoubtedly opened doors for me. Reflecting on it later, I was immensely grateful to my old Director of Sixth Form for persuading me to push outside my comfort zone and grasp that amazing opportunity.

While dd was growing up, we often talked about the fact that she might follow in my footsteps. She loved Cambridge whenever we would visit, and being cleverer and more confident that I ever was, I thought she had as good a chance as anyone to get in. She too saw herself going there, and we would often talk about how it might be. When it came to it, though, she decided that she hated the Cambridge course for her chosen subject. We went to the open day and she didn't like the ethos of the course at all. She decided that it wasn't what she wanted after all, and I will admit that I was disappointed. I had wanted her to have the same wonderful experience that I was lucky enough to have. I understood her decision, though, and recognised that it was the right one for her. She won't have the same experience as I did, but that's OK because she will have wonderful experiences of her own.

In this situation, I think you've got to try to support your ds without letting your own feelings affect your responses, I guess. If he really wants to leave and go to York, maybe that's the right thing for him. He's obviously an intelligent young man and I'm sure that he will have thought it through. It's his life and he has to live it in the way that makes sense to him. I don't think you were wrong to steer him towards applying to Oxford in the first place. It was an amazing opportunity that he might have really benefitted from, and ultimately, he chose to follow your advice which he didn't have to do - you didn't actually make him apply there. As things have turned out, it hasn't worked out as he had hoped, but that isn't your fault either - he might have ended up like me feeling grateful for having been persuaded. You couldn't possibly have known either way, it's just the way things go sometimes.

Now he needs to decide what's next, and you'll be there to support him through it no matter what. I wish him well!

Bring him home and let him work in a local cafe for the rest of the year.

DH was the Oxbridge liaison link at his school and took students there every year. They always had lunch with past pupils from his school and he said that very often those kids looked like shells of themselves and warned the prospective newbies not to go there. DH saw this so often that he felt he couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for either uni and stepped down from the role.

There's an awful lot of unnecessary inverted snobbery/Oxford-bashing on here.

I don't get that impression. I think posters recognise that it isn't for everyone, and that you have to be "Oxford shaped" to get the most out of it. DD doesn't have the academic ability, but even if she did I know she wouldn't have thrived there. She is an A student not an A* student, and had to work her socks off to achieve those As.

If anything there is Oxford snobbery on this thread where some parents think that if their DC are capable of getting the grades they should apply and go there whether they want to or not.

One thing I come across a lot is that many parents of humanities students on MN and other forums feel short changed at the lack of contact hours for their degree, and don't appreciate how much independent study is required, and I think to manage expectations it is worth the OP and/or her son finding out how his course is delivered in York before he leaves Oxford.

I also feel that the university experience is sold as having the time of your life when for many young people it isn't, so maybe the OP's son's experience feels doubly disappointing, especially as he only went there to please his family and teachers, which IMO is the wrong reason for going.

My husband is 64 and still bangs on that he wanted to go to York not Cambridge.

It really isn’t the same thing to say your child had the grades but applied elsewhere, or they applied but didn’t get in. It’s a huge thing to go to Uni and decide to move after a term and it’s even bigger if you’re moving from world class to not so well known.

I don’t believe all the students are nerds or that there isn’t adequate nightlife. I do think it’s more likely the step up in work is hurting. Make sure he gets the contact hours at York and ask what he’ll do if York say “no”, because the idea that he can walk in anywhere isn’t correct.

That should have said doubly disappointed.

I’m not sure he’ll get any more contact time at York. I was there doing an English degree in the mid 80s. Contact time then was a two hour seminar once a week and a weekly one hour tutorial, there was also a daily lecture but those were optional. The whole point of degree level education is that students have to be self motivated and that’s why so many struggle with the transition from school.

Having said that, it’s far less formal and the range of students is more diverse. York is beautiful city, it captures your heart and won’t let it go. Many of its graduates choose to stay there and I’d move back in a heartbeat.

This. Very well said. I would also have thought like the teachers turning down Oxford is nuts but it shows how wrong we can all be. (DD also got 4Astars and was desperate to go to Oxford but got rejected)

My 17year old has just been offered a place at Oxford. There's a lot to think about on this thread.

Partly we like the idea of Oxford because it still has catered halls, just like DH and I had in the 90s at our redbrick and poly experiences.

Friends kids at Bournemouth, Bristol, Cardiff etc are in flat shares of eight with shared kitchens and are having quite lonely experiences in that first year. It's a lot of stress and pressure with these imposed small groups. And there's surprisingly little common space, it's all monitised.

The model of Oxford colleges with common areas that you can hang out in for just an hour or all evening seems ideal for mixing and building friendships gradually. Very similar to our 1990s experiences. A chance for social contact at meal times rather than eating pasta in your room whilst scrolling through ticktock.

We're also bigging up the reserve choice - which I think would be different not better or worse.

Partly we like the idea of Oxford because it still has catered halls

I think there are pluses and minuses re catered halls.
For someone who is really shy it must be very daunting to walk down to the refectory where there are hundreds of students and you don't know anyone.

In a flatshare of 8 you get to meet your flatmates in the kitchen. The downsides are of course you might not get on with your flatmates and they might all leave the kitchen in a monumental mess.

The upsides is that if you have dietary requirements, love cooking, don't like fixed meal times and dislike the uninspiring mass catering offered at the university self catering is a better option. Swings and roundabouts.

I really liked having Hall to eat in at Cambridge, it was all cafeteria style even in the 90s when I was there (there was also a separate “formal hall” that you could book in the evening if you wanted a -very cheap- fully waiter service meal, maybe with a guest from another college)
You could go into cafeteria hall by yourself with a book if you wanted, or just sit down and chat to someone you met there randomly. But all rooms had shared basic cooking facilities too, so there was no obligation to eat in hall if you didn’t want to. It was pay as you go, so no financial penalty to not using it. Best of both worlds I think.

I have always enjoyed cooking and eating but I really could not have been bothered with shopping for food and cooking every night as a student, there are decades of that to come in adult life! Having the food there meant more time for fun and study.

They did lunch and dinner. I tended not to use it for lunch because I had always eaten sandwiches for linch, but I noticed that people who were used to school dinners often did.

It was also in a stunning room. That appealed to me, though I get that other people would not care. I find it very surprising when some people say “oh, I came from an ugly state school, I felt so out of place in all the beautiful, posh surroundings”. My perspective (having been at an ugly state comprehensive) was “well, I got here on merit, I am just as entitled to be in this place as someone who went to Eton” In fact, I felt rather sorry for the people who had never known anything but being educated in beautiful old buildings, because the took it all for granted and it was a bit “same old same old” for them. People like me fully appreciated it as it was such a contrast.

Rampant Ivy I'm very unsure about your idea that people who go to Oxford and don't hate it go up 'Oxford shaped'. You've come up with this idea a couple of times on this thread. Oxford has certainly shaped my DC but isn't that kind of the point of a decent quality uni education? I can't really see that with DC who are so different from one another and all their incredibly diverse friends, undergrads all go up with some sort of shared identity, other than being pretty bright. The selecting tutors actually seek out diversity.

Diversity in terms of character rather than more obvious diversity I mean.

I think that people who go to Oxford have a genuine passion for their subject, are prepared to work hard (and possibly play hard as well), are extremely focussed and self motivated, prepared to be constantly challenged, will go the extra mile and beyond what is expected and are actively invigorated by heavy workloads.

If you're a very academic child who likes a slower pace and, for example, more time to reflect on what you've done, it might not be for you.
If you merely enjoy your subject but don't live and breathe it, it might not be for you.
There are very academic students that don't thrive in the Oxford atmosphere.
There are equally academic students who would have thrived at Oxford and have done well elsewhere.

I teach at an RG and attended 'Oxbridge'.

A long time ago now, but I remember a sense of victimhood in the first couple of terms and that others must be having it better. Why were friends at just-as-good universities having an apparently great time and only 3 essays a term, when we had 2 essays a week?! In retrospect this was down to feeling that we didn't quite fit, and that people with the kinds of lives and careers we had in mind (unflashy, public sector) often did go elsewhere.

The social life seemed very limited at the time - very masculine college bars, very old-guy or touristy pubs, a handful of terrible nightclubs, formal dinners, sports team drinks - generally very alcohol-focused.

It improved gradually as colleges and departments introduced cafes and the hospitality sector improved, and it got easier for students looking outside their college for a social life to find it.

On contact time - our norm, typical for RGs, is about 3 contact hours per 20-credit module per week. We have two semesters: a 12-week teaching term inclusive of a reading week and revision week. So students are generally around for 12 weeks each semester, no different really to 3 x 8 week terms.

The way we teach is intentionally different because we have larger groups, use lectures/seminars rather than personal tutorials, and different expectations of how much prep students do. The best students do study full-time - some even try and keep a 9-5 routine.

Everything students need to know to get their good 2.1 is in the teaching materials. Students can still be creative and read off-list - it's great when they do, just quite rare. We often see them a little more often in personal meetings during the revision/assessment period after the teaching period.

There are attendance and engagement issues, which were building before Covid - and have affected students socially and emotionally too. On the teaching and learning side, students like the option to watch lecture videos after lectures, so that's provided. But this reduces in-person attendance, particularly when the lecture rooms are further off the beaten track, or dingy, or the lecture is 9am or 5pm. It can mean teaching gets very small-group though designed for larger groups. A lecture designed for a group of 20 could have 3 students if at 9am in a week when they have deadlines for other modules. Lectures have become more chatty and interactive, but there can still be a sense that the teaching model is not quite right given how students now are, just for different reasons than the Oxbridge case. Lecturers with more seniority, or teaching larger modules, don't have this issue so much. So students tend to have a mix of experiences, from big lectures to accidentally-tiny seminar groups.

Students tend to gear their effort around assessments - whether weekly essays as at Oxbridge with exams at the end of a three-year degree, or more periodic coursework/exams elsewhere. Modules now may have (for example) 1 formative piece of work, a shorter (e.g. 25%) summative and longer summative assessment each. So for a standard non-STEM programme with 6 20-credit modules a year, you can work out the general contact time and assessment load.

We have some very bright students, and ability ranges are quite narrow - for a course with an AAB tariff, most of the students will have AAB or above because that's the way university entry works. I'd say that RG students also have the feeling of being a small fish and anxiety about suddenly not leading the pack. It's tough for some students to have to stop relying on being smart and the quickest on the uptake, if that's been important to them - especially when university teaching values research skills and consistency rather than effortless ease, and increasingly so.

My one thought on looking at the OP's message is that York is hardly a very different city in terms of size, medieval buildings, city nightlife - though the difference in teaching delivery, university buildings etc may well appeal. One thing that is good for students at Oxbridge is that their tutors get to know them personally and often remember them for years. This may be changing slightly as tutors are increasingly on temporary contracts or unable to afford living in the city, so don't stay for decades as in the past.

With Oxford's 'optional' lectures, you can attend those outside your own modules, a brilliant thing to do. The copyright libraries are an amazing resource. The language classes open to all students were excellent. I went to graduate seminars outside my subject, and spent a lot of time reading novels in cafes. I eventually got a part-time job and started volunteering. It's not easy if you don't feel you fit in. But some of us will have that feeling wherever we go in life, and it really is what you make of it.

This student could do very well at York and it probably won't make a big difference in the end either way. It would help both him & the OP if they frame it as having genuinely learned a lot from a year of personal tutorials, having had to do Anglo-Saxon etc and done well at it (it's good for students to do something difficult), and the satisfaction of good grades in Mods, before moving on. I presume they would stay on alumni lists and might also have access to things like the Careers Service for a little while. He should keep in touch with friends he made, and can get a visiting card to the Bodleian - just see it as moving on, as everyone has to do eventually.

Lots of people do visiting years e.g. as international students with no qualification at the end - so should see it in those terms. Still being educated and extending horizons, then doing something else. (By the way, he wouldn't get student loan finance for a year abroad - students are allowed one 'extra' year.)

Make it a positive choice - so he uses his time at York to genuinely learn what he can & take full advantage of what they and the student community have to offer. He should make sure he builds his own academically-elite educational experience, and make full use of his brain and his time.

And quickly - he will need to find out now whether 2023 entry is still possible. I think the first UCAS deadline has passed. English is traditionally popular, and they may not go into Clearing. It's also a baby boom year. It should be possible to find out - just don't assume they will create an extra space for him if he applies in early September. Universities are then scrambling to find teaching spaces and temporary lecturers for the programmes which have over-recruited beyond prediction and planning.

@Catnary a huge part of the appeal for Oxford for my Harry Potter mad child is to live a magical architectural life. Genuinely will get a thrill from a stone staircase, oil portraits and wood paneling.
I can see my teen getting joy from the magic, growing up and then coming out a grown up.

@strykey thank you for your thoughtful post.
Mumsnet can be such an excellent resource, can't believe I have a teen off to uni, I came here in the dial up days looking for what were really the baby equipment essentials.

Thank you @redskydelight. You have described DD to a T. There is no academic subject she is truly passionate about, and she does need a slower pace to "get" things.

That's what I meant about some students are not Oxbridge material @goodbyestranger. Your DC clearly are. Mine and many others aren't. She did a subject she liked and wanted to do, but there was no "passion" about it.

And @Distressedstudent please stop feeling you are to blame in any way. Your son may be a young adult now but this path started a long time ago. I'd argue the work ethic to be considering Oxbridge stems from Primary so it's never a snap or over night decision.
And given the sixth form timescale we are asking children to make decisions with adult implications at a very hard time without much life experience. Parents and teachers have to be part of that conversation in a way we don't just a few short years later. I think you did the right thing but don't shoulder any blame, except the credit for getting him out the home nest.

I see what you're trying to say RampantIvy but in fact these are just generalisations which don't reflect actuality particularly well. MN has a habit of making sweeping statements about modern Oxbridge. Not surprisingly the worst culprits for this seem to be those without DC who've recently been there. All credit to your DD for knowing what she wants and what will suit her best.

I'd argue the work ethic to be considering Oxbridge stems from Primary

Blimey. Poor kids whose parents actually believe this!

My Ds says there are loads of tiktoks made by Oxbridge students saying how hard they have to work. Coupled with the image of chapels, choirs and chinos which are a billion miles away from who he is, he thinks he’d be really unhappy there. I know too that a lot of black students have really struggled in the past. I hope that has changed now.