‘I see little point’: UK university students on why attendance has plummeted

39 comments

1. **About half the students who got in touch skip lectures, with many ‘disappointed’ with the experience and others forced to prioritise paid work**

   Not sure how representative this is since the Guardian asked students to contact them, but at least it gives some insight.

   Edit: the article refers to the Times Higher Education article https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/lectures-question-paid-work-pushes-attendance-even-lower

2. Don’t worry guys, the Conservative Party will force you to join the military or work for free instead.

   My degree seemed like a rip off 15 years ago, now that it is 3 times more expensive I can imagine why people are pissed off.

   There were other benefits to university of course, and it did help get my first job. But it sounds like university is becoming unaffordable for anyone except the children of the wealthy.

3. I didn’t get above 30% attendance in each year and it made no difference tbh. Still glad I went though.

4. >“A minimum attendance rate of 75% is unreasonable and harms students’ mental health. The current undergraduates no longer learn that way: They took all of their A-levels during Covid, so are more accustomed to doing some learning in-person and some learning online.”

   Eh, fuck off mate.

   Attend the course or fail.

   University is **already** a different environment to college, you aren’t spoon fed the required information – you’re expected to go out and actually do some self study and learning (arguably the most valuable part of the degree). Attending classes remotely doesn’t provide even two thirds of the benefits of being there in person, namely group discussions and asking the lecturer questions – and we all know how shit group discussions over teams for work are.

   >“The word ‘expect’ comes up a lot. One student said to me: ‘I pay high fees, I’ve bought this degree.’ There is a sense of entitlement, it feels very disheartening.”

   This is my lecturer friends opinion of all those overseas students as well, now it’s infecting the home based ones – I’ve paid my money, so give me my degree, never mind if I turned up or did the coursework.

   That does, of course, lead to a complete cheapening of the value of the degree.

5. When I was at uni our lectures were all recorded so I always found it better to watch lectures at home as you could pause them to take notes, go back etc whereas in person once you miss something that is that – they always tried to encourage us to come in but it was never enforced. It probably depends on the course though, this was engineering with over 300 people – if it was some social science with small group seminars then it’s totally different ig

6. Well yeah, we took one of the finest educational systems in the world and turned it into a for-profit degree mill. That’s not to say it isn’t worth going to university for certain things – of course it is. But there are a preponderance of useless degrees that give you debt with little to no career development.

   I quit halfway through my degree (Maths + Comp Sci) to take a job. I earn more now than the people who stuck with the degree. Substantially more. Industry experience >>>>>> degree

7. Degrees just aren’t the golden ticket to a good paying job they used to be because everyone and their grandma has one

8. I went to uni long before the pandemic and my attendance rate for lectures across my bachelors was well below 50%, in some modules it was zero outside of submissions and exams. Same was true for many of my coursemates. Still got a first easily enough and made friends on the course.

   Don’t see what has changed other than maybe more people do this since the pandemic has changed expectations.

   Also, this is a phone in survey. This is selection bias from the students who feel strongly enough to respond. Hardly representative of the student population.

9. A degree is basically a very expensive, 3 year long IQ test for most people. The actual skills and knowledge you get is completely irrelevent to your job and could easily have been learned for free. The only practical thing you’re really getting out of uni is the certification – you’re showing employers you have a certain level of intelligence. That’s all it really is.

10. For 3 years, universities and the government told us that learning at home was equivalent. Is this really surprising?

11. If the students aren’t getting much value out of it, then perhaps the universities need to actually listen to that feedback. It could well be that the old model of lectures just isn’t fit for purpose. It probably never was, but was the best that could be done at the time.

    Instead of getting stuck to these old ideas universities should embrace continuous improvement and change their methods.

    Education doesn’t have to be punishing just because it was when you did it 50 years ago.

12. Please note plenty of companies willnpay you to get a degree.

13. I finishes my degree in 2019. On one of my electives I had exactly two seminars, as there was a strike.

    The young people who went to uni during covid paid the same amount as me and had no seminars.

    Now covid is over, there’s even more strikes on and off.

    Young people are paying for a service they are not getting.

14. When I was at uni if you had poor attendance then you were given a failing grade. Lectures and tutorials and labs are not optional but should be mandatory. Going to uni isn’t a walk in the park. It’s meant to be hard and require you to study hard.

15. Maybe if lecturers actually learnt how to teach then that number would increase. It’s mental – just knowing the content doesn’t mean you can teach it.

    Teaching is its own separate skill that most lecturers are absolutely deficient in.

16. To quote the young copper lass from Blue Lights, “everything’s just fucked.”

17. Leeds Met 2010, last year before the tripling. I lived at home and needed to work too, sometimes on lecture days. I literally had no parental support financially

    .  Lectures back then were poorly attended as slides were online. Seminars slightly worse as it was just rehashing. Also you can’t have any serious discussion in 1 hour.  

     Barely 12-16 hours a week total . Often not with the same people in each class so hard to make friends(poor decision by admin)

     Most reading online so never saw anyone in library (less chance to strike up friendship.and romance😆)  

    Should have gone abroad for a fraction of the cost, much more structured learning or a better UK uni   

    Finished with cut wrists and anti depressants in my last week due to hurting my back at work and being penniless for a year and the complete lack of human contact (my home was dysfunctional and most people didn’t talk on my course. Thank you to those few who did 🙂
    . I guess I got my middle class experience in the end 😅

18. Yeah, I literally had 0% attendance (rounded down from 0.4 or something like that) and I got a First in Law. The lectures are fucking pointless, seminars are very useful but were too much work for me to bother

    Granted, this was mainly possible because my exams were all online and open-book after Covid, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or at least it wasn’t before ChatGPT

19. Lectures are an obsolete concept. Serve no real purpose, no lecturer can beat YouTube.

20. Perhaps universities could use this knowledge to operate as airlines or banks do, and enroll more students than they strictly have places for in the knowledge only a portion will generally ever be present at any one lecture; the consequences of an odd ‘overcrowding’ being much less than a ‘bank run’ or ‘overbooked’ plane, one wonders why this is not done if it isn’t already.

21. I feel like covid also took away a lot of the social elements of uni, but I’m not sure as obviously I don’t know what it was like before. But you go to classes and no one talks to each other. I went to uni for the experience (I know it’s stupid) and I’ve still mostly been able to have it but it’s prob going to die out soon as well

22. For my second degree (lol don’t @ me, it wasn’t planned) everything was online. I passed the module without going to a single lecture or seminar.

23. I went to Brighton uni at the tail end of the pandemic. My first year was majorly disrupted but we all agreed it was reasonable as we where still battling covid. By second year however we where still social distancing on our course. Life had returned to normal. One lecturer literally said to us “I live in London and don’t want to travel down”. Can you imagine in any other job field if you basically said I can’t be arsed, you’d be fired.

24. I graduated a couple of years ago and I distinctly remember asking a lecturer to explain something again (in a small group tutorial) because I didn’t follow the explanation and I got told university lecturers are not there to explain things to students but simply to tell us what to go away and learn.

    Okay, you know what else does that? The syllabus. Fuck off. So yeah, why sit in an unventilated lecture hall when I can sit at home and take notes freely (without being told “pens down and listen” or “can everyone stop typing this is important”), take breaks, Google stuff I don’t understand etc etc

25. It’s been a while since I was in Uni where I studied a biology subject. I do genuinely think that I would have been better off in my career spending 4 years volunteering. It took me nearly 2 years after graduating to even get a sniff of a job and that only came after I spent 6 months full time volunteering on £55 a week. Experience counts for a lot more.

    A degree is great, I will never regret the first 3 years where I learnt so much about me, what I’d tolerate from people, I grew up a lot. I don’t think I could have gone right in to a job at 18.

    But then if we go down that route people from poorer backgrounds are fucked.

26. There’s very little point in attending anyway. Getting through courses nowadays has so very little to do with sitting down and paying attending.

27. I went to university to study how to produce music.

    I was not taught how to produce music. I was however instead tested on my current ability to produce music. Which I learnt at college in a lot less time and for a lot less money.

    Do not study creative arts through UK universities. Finding teachers outside of the system is better. Universities basically have you running tickboxes so they can say that you passed the course and “look” good.

28. They’re not wrong. The only value I got out of university were social skills rather than academic skills. The course I did and the tutors that led it were absolutely woeful. The cost of them nowadays is astronomical as well.

29. I get the cost of living part but thats only 1 reason they stated for students not doing the work. Getting a degree requires actual work, it’s not going to be just handed to you

30. So why is there a shortage of student accommodation then?

31. Icl I rarely attend lectures. A lot of people on my course just sit there and talk and it’s distracting. Rather get my work done in my room and schedule it around my life. Still averaging 80% in engineering so it’s not adversely affecting me.

32. I didn’t really meet many people on my course, I was also one of the people who only showed up occasionally and just did the work. This was nearly 20 years ago, and it wasn’t that abnormal even then.

    But I knew lots of people just from hanging out around campus and from first year in halls, and was out all the time (I didn’t even drink much. Just turning up to open house parties, getting random invites by talking to new people etc. Most of the people I knew were friends and hung out with people almost entirely not involved in their course.

    I don’t personally measure university as a cost that I need to get back financially. We don’t have long, and university is an amazing place to meet lots of people from countless backgrounds, get early independence, and just experience different types of people and situations that people who go straight into work will likely never get the chance to experience ever. If you take everything you can from it, it makes you are more rounded person. The idea I got pretend debt that will never impact my life, never impact credit, never impact a mortgage, and costs very little per month if I earn a decent amount isn’t something that makes it not worthwhile.

33. In 1980 only 15% of people past the age of 18 went to University or some other form of higher education.

    I’d far rather go back to that older system and properly fund those who do go than continue this lie that’s being peddled to young people that University is necessary to their future financial prospects when, given the crippling debt now imposed on them, the opposite seems to be far more of the case.

34. To be honest, I don’t necessarily blame them, and it makes little difference in my opinion.

    I went to university for four years, and my attendance was sporadic. The lecturers didn’t do much in the way of teaching, and it’s all very much about independent work anyway. I walked away with two degrees, including a First, and while granted they afforded the opportunity to get into the career I wanted, my time was better utilised by doing volunteer work, developing social skills, focusing on mental and physical health etc.

    You’re better off using the X amount of years to build your character. Everything else follows with it.

35. It isn’t surprising, because far too many lectures are just literally the lecturer reading off slides and not even really engaging the audience in any meaningful way. Couple that with the increasing financial pressures on people and it is no wonder that attendance is through the floor.

36. I’m an American who attended Uni both in the USA and UK. Some things that I think would help this issue: 1. Participation grades and discussion grades. Many professors in the US will grade you on your participation and your critical thinking skills in organized discussions.

    2. More days in the classroom. Classes for a singular module are anywhere from 2-3 times a week and we usually take 5 modules a semester. More information and learning time for students. Students in the UK don’t take enough modules in my opinion to get the breadth and depth/practical skills in their subject.

    3. More varied modules- American universities tend to offer a really wide range of modules, many of which you can apply toward your degree. That way, you can learn what you want without getting bored. You can also pursue internships/ work placements for credit and the uni helps you find a suitable work environment.

    4. For god sake fund loans so students aren’t worried about their finances while studying. A hungry student or an overworked student is not going to prioritize their learning.

37. I remember going on marches in the mid 90’s to protest against student loans appearing as a way of supporting oneself during higher education. At the time, I didn’t really feel like getting a small loan to survive for the three years of my degree course was all that bad. And at the end of it, I did walk right into a job.

    But now I understand – having your young people borrow from their own futures to fund their education is simply a sign that a government has chosen an education strategy that it cannot afford. And we are now seeing the inevitable consequences of that strategy.

    It was an avoidable outcome then, but now I suppose it’s too late.

38. must admit I skipped most “lecture” and only went to lab sessions. I could learn much more by myself in the library, just using the lecture slides as a starting point. actually attending a shite lecture with a huge number of students there added absolutely zero value.

39. And folk look at me like I’ve got three heads when I say I don’t really want my kids to go to uni and would probably feel some disappointment if they did. 

    We need a more vocational approach to education, better access to on the job learning and qualifications and it needs to start at high school level.