Enabling students to succeed isn’t mollycoddling

What should students expect from their university?

I like to think in terms of education and experience – the academic journey that we initially sign up for, and the experiences that shape who we are.

This journey is one that we embark on at huge (and often unexpected) financial cost, and that’s without even acknowledging the barriers of mental or physical health that so many of us have to overcome to access our education.

It’s pretty reasonable, then, for us to ask universities to meet us halfway.

You can therefore imagine my disappointment whilst reading an article in a national news outlet by my own former psychology lecturer claiming that “mollycoddling universities are setting young people up to fail.”

I have always been proud of my university’s progressive approach to minimising barriers to education, helped by its strong collaboration with the SU and respect of our students’ voice.

Had I not been supported by the university’s support services and deadline extension system, I would likely have dropped out of university when I found myself in a mental health crisis in my first year.

That’s why I was incredibly concerned to read one of my lecturers using infantilising language to describe my university’s increasingly modernised approach to education.

I’m worried that while there have been advances in understanding students in recent years across the sector, articles of this sort and the attitudes it reflects might serve to slow down or even turn back some of that progress in higher education.

Alienating glamour

The author’s lectures encouraged me to develop my critical thinking and challenge what I read – so I will match the article’s claims to the context of our students.

It first discusses how the university, like many others, has adopted captured content, enabling students to work from home.

The piece acknowledges how this helps student carers and commuters to engage with studies, and agree that leaving your room and attending lectures can be an important part of wellbeing and social connectivity.

My SU team, like many others, feels strongly about building communities on campus, with plenty of SUs like mine organising events and initiatives on campus to build connections.

But the benefits of physical attendance don’t invalidate the need for recorded lectures. Glamorising stories of students attending lectures despite holding down multiple jobs or navigating public transport whilst being visually impaired is unhelpful – doing so suggests that attendance per se is a gold standard when contrasted with students who “just don’t want to come” to lectures.

One of my members shared with me how that perception can feel like a guilt-trip: “because there’s such a strong emphasis that if you don’t come in you’re not trying hard enough, you feel you have to because of the pressure. How can I do my best when I’m forced to push my body so hard I collapse?”.

I doubt that that is the message that some are trying to convey, but broadly painting students who access recorded lectures rather than in-person lectures as having “poor life management skills” is incredibly alienating.

The piece also suggests a tactic of deliberately keeping lecture videos purposefully dull, twisting the arms of students to choose between poor learning materials or attending lectures at personal cost (as in the above student’s example).

It may be a flippant remark in an op-ed – but suggests an underhanded approach to encouraging attendance, that violates the spirit of accessibility underpinning recorded lectures, and stands against students’ needs and the culture fostered by inclusivity teams.

Dedication or desperation?

The article also discusses inclusive approaches to deadline extensions. The piece mischaracterises the approach of allowing students to “self-certify” an illness as supporting those who are “disorganised” or “perfectionists” – despite extensions doing little to change the fact that assignments must eventually be completed.

Students tell us that self-certified ECs serve to empower them. Most staff in universities are able to self-certify for illnesses resulting in time off work, yet in the past most students weren’t afforded the same luxury. Getting the “correct” evidence for illness from a struggling health service (which many of them are on placement in) was a needless barrier for our students, in addition to the financial strain of obtaining a £20 sick note from the doctors.

Another student shared with me how they were “concerned at the environment being created” if students are expected to meet a deadline despite unnecessary stress and risk to self. That was partly in response to the piece describing how a student “came in with stitches in her head after a brain operation”, and another “stepped over her alcoholic mum in the morning to get the bus.”

I am no academic, but I would not be touting these as success stories of dedicated students. I have nothing but empathy for the harrowing circumstances these students have worked through, and think a deadline extension is the least I could do.

Lifting a line from my psychology books, however, these examples may instead be a fundamental attribution error – maybe these students’ “dedication” isn’t one of academic commitment, but is necessitated by the (deliberately!) poor quality of their professor’s dull recorded lectures.

What sort of challenge?

It feels especially disingenuous for this article to have been framed as “universities setting students up to fail” by including these adjustments, when they are designed to level the playing field and help our students to succeed.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that the working world is completely devoid of workplace adjustments, deadline extensions, and remote working. Should we not be expecting students, as future innovators and leaders, to ask for more? To push for not only education, but for the working world to be inclusive and accessible?

The truth is that a home student finance system that – unlike most other countries – doesn’t give students the flexibility to reduce their academic commitments if they hit a setback, coupled with a similar system for international students that makes extending a visa all but impossible, all mean that endless extensions are the last thing that most students want – but in the absence of that flexibility, often need.

The same is true of campus attendance too. I can barely remember ever meeting a student that isn’t keen to come to campus as much as possible – but commutes, part-time work demands, caring responsibilities and timetables that assume that everyone is a 5-minute walk away all prevent them from doing so. Shaming them doesn’t help.

The other truth is that support networks and adjustments that have enabled so many of us to stay in education being minimised as “mollycoddling” completely misses the point. And the danger is that we miss the genuinely important questions – do recorded lectures detract from our ability to engage with university? How do you balance compassion for students’ situations with academic expectations? And so on.

Approaching these questions through the antiquated lens of university being about being “toughened up”, as though this is something to be celebrated, will get us nowhere.

University should absolutely challenge us, educate us and to train us in new skills. But the idea that we should let students “fall through the cracks” when education doesn’t meet their needs is a leap backwards from where many of us hoped inclusive education was going.

We make immense personal and financial sacrifice to be at university – I strongly believe that we have the right to access the adjustments we need to learn and excel.