On the morning after St Patrick’s Day, I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed and made my way to my 9am tutorial. Brutal, I know. What was even more brutal was the realisation that I was the only person in my tutorial group who had made the effort to show up at all. I entered an empty classroom inhabited solely by my poor tutor, who had clearly wasted an hour of his life by showing up to work that morning. We chatted for five minutes, and he let me go; neither of us was determined enough to carry out the tutorial in the absence of the rest of the group.
This prompted me to reflect on the way in which people treat uni. To many, especially in pre-honours years, it’s no more than a side-quest — lectures and tutorials squeezed somewhere in our schedules between jobs, societies, and going out.
If we want to actually get something more than a diploma out of our education, we have to do better. But the university has to do better as well. University education is making itself dangerously easy to sideline in the lives of students. Humanities and social science degrees are particularly vulnerable to this. As a History and Politics student, I have no more than nine hours of class per week, and the typical assessment structure for a course is one midterm essay and one final essay. Surely I did more work during A-levels. After finishing each semester, I can’t help but feel slightly unsatisfied. This is especially jarring given how much I pay to be here as an international student.
According to a 2024 report by the Higher Education Policy Institute, in England, “after steadily increasing over the past two decades […] the proportion of young people choosing to go to higher education has gone into reverse in the past two years.” While the explanations for why more young people are opting out of going to university are many, the feeling that we are paying to, ultimately, sit in the library, teach ourselves the content, and write a few essays to which we will receive a couple of lines of rather vague feedback, doesn’t help.
The benefits of university beyond the actual degree — namely the people we get to meet, the societies we get to join, the number of opportunities to get involved and grow outside of the curriculum — are undeniable. Yet is this enough to warrant the £26,500 yearly international fees? To make higher education worthwhile, we all need to do better, starting by actually showing up to the already limited number of classes.
Photo by Spencer Siles for The Student.
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Are we sidelining our education?
On the morning after St Patrick’s Day, I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed and made my way to my 9am tutorial. Brutal, I know. What was even more brutal was the realisation that I was the only person in my tutorial group who had made the effort to show up at all. I entered an empty classroom inhabited solely by my poor tutor, who had clearly wasted an hour of his life by showing up to work that morning. We chatted for five minutes, and he let me go; neither of us was determined enough to carry out the tutorial in the absence of the rest of the group.
This prompted me to reflect on the way in which people treat uni. To many, especially in pre-honours years, it’s no more than a side-quest — lectures and tutorials squeezed somewhere in our schedules between jobs, societies, and going out.
If we want to actually get something more than a diploma out of our education, we have to do better. But the university has to do better as well. University education is making itself dangerously easy to sideline in the lives of students. Humanities and social science degrees are particularly vulnerable to this. As a History and Politics student, I have no more than nine hours of class per week, and the typical assessment structure for a course is one midterm essay and one final essay. Surely I did more work during A-levels. After finishing each semester, I can’t help but feel slightly unsatisfied. This is especially jarring given how much I pay to be here as an international student.
According to a 2024 report by the Higher Education Policy Institute, in England, “after steadily increasing over the past two decades […] the proportion of young people choosing to go to higher education has gone into reverse in the past two years.” While the explanations for why more young people are opting out of going to university are many, the feeling that we are paying to, ultimately, sit in the library, teach ourselves the content, and write a few essays to which we will receive a couple of lines of rather vague feedback, doesn’t help.
The benefits of university beyond the actual degree — namely the people we get to meet, the societies we get to join, the number of opportunities to get involved and grow outside of the curriculum — are undeniable. Yet is this enough to warrant the £26,500 yearly international fees? To make higher education worthwhile, we all need to do better, starting by actually showing up to the already limited number of classes.
Photo by Spencer Siles for The Student.
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