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The news that Cambridge University is conducting all its lectures online in the 2020-2021 year, swiftly followed by other major universities, such as Manchester, has prompted a wave of nostalgia from some. The usual suspects are desperate to tell us of their one-to-one tutorials in book-lined studies with pipe-smoking, frottaging dons: nostalgia for what never was, for so many. Anyone who has been near a higher education institution lately knows that the loss of actual contact hours was an issue way before this pandemic.
If so much is to be done online. why pay more than £9k to go to college? Why not defer until you can see the whites of the star-academics’ eyes? Actually, both questions ignore the holding pattern that our young people are in. While elderly people are acutely vulnerable during the pandemic, it is the young ones whose lives are being twisted beyond all recognition. The exams they were told were so crucial by stressed-out teachers disappeared overnight. They are to be evaluated on mocks – terrible news for many of them.
Those who have university places don’t know when they are going or what will happen if there is the predicted second viral spike. My youngest is at home waiting for clear information and, I have to say, incredibly patient and hopeful in this limbo. Indeed, so many young people are adapting wonderfully to this uncertainty. This doesn’t mean I don’t see the proliferation of mental health issues – but if any generation is to be congratulated for its forbearance, it is this one.
At any other time one would have said defer, and work or travel, as possibly 20% of the intake will do, but in a time of mass unemployment jobs such as pulling pints will be impossible. So will trips abroad. Fruit-picking and contact-tracing seem the rather limited options.
For those already at university, everything suddenly stopped in March. There was no face-to-face contact, they were simply thrown into the void of dissertation writing. For art students, there are no final-year shows, the very things they have been working towards.
Some lecturers report that they spend their days counselling disappointed students; others say the online sessions are already deeply unsatisfactory. It’s one thing wandering late into a lecture, another to have your tutor sit there ever more irritated at her laptop as the minutes tick by.
Ever since tuition fees came in, the idea that leaving for college was an essential rite of passage has been dented. Students may live with parents if they can have access to their chosen courses. One of the criticisms of Normal People when it was shown on TV was its recreation of an old-fashioned view of student life, although it showed clearly main character Marianne’s class privilege compared with her on-off boyfriend Connell, who has no accommodation over the summer months.
Currently, all universities say they will try to incorporate “blended learning” with small tutorials. But no one pretends freshers’ week can be replicated online. A more serious problem is that both arts and science students need socially distanced studios and labs to work in. Without that, it is possible that many international students will go elsewhere. The extent to which the system is underwritten by Chinese money is now apparent, and the marketisation of education inevitably means some universities will go under.
Surely if anyone should be at the forefront of changing the way we learn, it should be universities. Lectures should not be simply streamed and consumed passively as if they were just another egocentric Ted talk. Much more interactive methodology is needed. Even the chat during a Zoom presentation is often as interesting as the presentation.
Cognitive serendipity, where connections are made, is the goal. All of this involves more, not less, work for teaching staff, but let’s not go into mourning for a mythical university experience that has not been the norm for many students for many years. Instead let peer-to-peer and collaborative learning come to the fore.
This is an opportunity to reframe what the student experience is. Maybe I say that because I went to college as a mature student, and was recently a student again. But the idea of cramming everything from the years 5 to 22 in the traditionally structured way has always seemed very limited to me. As has the idea that the rite of passage of leaving home via college is the only way to do things.
There have to be other ways in which young people can mark their independence, especially now for this generation stuck between pre- and post-Covid-19 times. A degree of flexibility is needed as well as reparations for what they have already lost. We should mark that loss so they can move forward, because move forward they will.
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