Whilst we are still firmly in the grip of the pandemic it is hard to gauge which of the changes we have experienced as "the new normal" this year will persist once, eventually, the restrictions are relaxed and life will become more familiar.
No doubt the owners of Amazon, Zoom and Deliveroo will hope that the boost to their businesses will continue and equally, many small retail outlets, leisure facilities and restaurants will be only too delighted to resume their normal trading. Education too is on the cusp of potentially revolutionary change; not so much in the world of schools perhaps, but certainly in the world of universities.
For the former, whilst the shift to remote learning has accelerated many schools’ journeys along the silicon road, we can be confident that schools will look and feel fairly similar once they are fully reopen. I’m not sure that this will be the case for universities. The challenges of the pandemic have called into question the fundamental role of universities in our society in a way it could never do with schools. Consider the average experience for a student in their second year of their university course.
After the initial excitement of the first term in 2019, and some mildly concerning reports about a strange disease which startled to emerge that Christmas, they have been forced into a student lifestyle that couldn’t be more different from what they would have expected. Face to face teaching is much reduced, and in some cases, absent. Rather than the whirl of social activities and making new friends, they are largely confined to their uncomfortable, expensive accommodation often with people they don’t know or, worse, like much less than they thought they did when they signed their accommodation contract earlier in the previous year. Meanwhile tuition fees continue to be charged with little quarter in remission terms given by their often surprisingly cash-strapped institutions.
Students have reported higher than average dissatisfaction levels not only with their courses but with their lives themselves. Unsurprisingly, mental health problems are significant. Much of this is of course due to the disappointment of what would be a special three years of their lives being blighted by the restrictions due to the pandemic even if, in the vast majority of cases, the illness itself. But, stripped of all of the fun which surrounds the study, it has called into question the reasons themselves for attending university. Most university graduates would acknowledge that their reasons for studying for their degree were not quite the lofty intellectual aspirations they may have identified on their UCAS forms or in their admissions interviews. Of course they may have (mostly) enjoyed their courses, but often the real reasons for attending are a mix of increased employability together with a desire to go through the rites of passage that are enjoyed now by half of the youngsters in the country. FOMO, as they might say. Is this a bad thing? Well, I suppose it depends on what you believe university is for. If you believe the primary function of a university education is to act as a passport to a well-paid job and increased life prosperity, then I would ask you if you thought that was the most effective way to act as a proxy for business recruitment practices. The growth of high value and successful degree apprenticeships would call in to question the necessity for the traditional three years at university in order to carry out highly skilled roles. Rather than relying on the shorthand of degree institution and course, recruitment departments could, and increasingly are, devise alternative methods to get the best possible employees. If however you believe that universities’ prime function is to act as reservoirs of knowledge or non-profit making bodies dedicated to the pursuit of new frontiers in academia, then you will see a degree as an essential part of the rights of a citizen in a civilised society. I wouldn’t disagree, but I would argue that such a purist’s view of study is inconsistent with the massive expansion of the number of institutions and courses over the last twenty years.
Perhaps the fallout of the pandemic will force us to ask the unaskable question. Do we want so many youngsters going to university after all or might they better served moving into the world of work straight after school?