As associate dean of educational development and quality, I’m leading a cross-college project at Camberwell, Chelsea, and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts to introduce a new unit focused on improving graduate outcomes.
While preparing for delivery, I’ve been struck by how often colleagues still use the phrase “real world” to describe anything beyond the classroom. I want to ask a simple question: should we stop using it?
In practice, “real world” has become shorthand for curriculum that connects to external, practical, or professional contexts – live briefs set by industry partners, or projects developed with community organisations. Students often value these experiences. They can build networks, test career ambitions, and produce work that strengthens portfolios and CVs, while also offering opportunities to apply subject knowledge in unfamiliar situations and to think critically under alternative guidance.
Universities value them too. External partnerships can support knowledge exchange, bring in income, strengthen civic relationships, and help performance against increasing regulatory measures such as the B3 metrics overseen by the Office for Students (OfS).
In art and design subjects, there are long-standing concerns about how graduate outcomes are captured. Many graduates develop portfolios, freelance, or combine part-time roles while establishing their practice, and a single survey snapshot can miss this complexity. The result is data that doesn’t always reflect how creative careers unfold – and faced with that reality, universities have understandably invested more energy in employability initiatives and graduate attributes work.
What students told us
There have been many conversations and focus groups with students involved in the co-design of the unit. From these, we recognised that if students were given the tools and resources, they would focus on creating projects that activate the 3Es – employability, enterprise, and entrepreneurship – as evidenced by Changemaker projects. Changemakers are a group of students who work across the colleges, funded at the living wage, delivering work that activates the University of the Arts London’s (UAL) climate, racial, and social justice principles.
What was striking, however, was that students recognised this work wasn’t operating at scale and that curriculum change was needed to achieve the greatest impact. Student feedback pointed to a requirement for a more consistent yet flexible approach, and highlighted the need to adapt delivery so that all students receive a baseline of professional content through the curriculum. Students also noted the challenges of engaging with extracurricular activity given external commitments – work, travel, and family.
The unit will be delivered at scale to all Stage Two undergraduate students – approximately 1,200 in total – and responds directly to student requests for clearer, more substantive preparation for their professional futures.
Not a new debate
I don’t recall students suggesting that university life isn’t “real world” – however, I’ve noticed that as the effort to embed employability has intensified across the sector, so has the return of the phrase.
This debate is not new. In a 2015 blog post, Stephanie Verni argued that we should replace “real world” with “working world”, pointing out that the former suggests that school or university life is somehow unreal. In a 2019 Medium article, Adam Dyche wrote that “everyone who is living is living in the real world”, warning that the phrase risks undermining students’ sense of agency. Alison James made a similar argument in a 2015 piece for the Times Higher Education, cautioning that invoking “the real world” can be used to excuse poor practice, as if harshness or unfairness were simply preparation for life beyond education.
What the phrase implies
What troubles me is the assumption that sits quietly underneath the phrase. If we describe professional contexts as “real”, what does that make the lecture theatre, the studio, the workshop – somehow artificial?
Education is not a rehearsal. For our students, it is their present reality. They pay for it, work within it, form relationships within it, and are judged within it. The stakes feel real because they are real.
Of course we should connect learning to professional, civic, and community contexts – we should design live projects, build partnerships, and support students in building networks. But we can describe that work accurately without suggesting that everything else is a kind of simulation.
Time to retire it
Language shapes belief. If we continue to talk about preparing students for the “real world”, we imply that their current world doesn’t count. At a time when higher education institutions are under intense scrutiny about value and purpose, that feels like a risky message to send.
It’s time to retire the phrase. We could say “professional practice”, “external engagement”, “community-based work”, or simply “work beyond the university” – all are more precise, and none carry the suggestion that education itself is unreal.
I’m not the first to raise this concern, and I won’t be the last. I encourage colleagues to join me in questioning the term “real world” across our institutions and adopting language that reflects the reality of students’ lives and learning.
It’s not real I suppose because the students aren’t required to earn a living. Three years of HE creates a limbo period before the reality of having to enter the workplace full-time kicks in. And it is also illusionary as there is a fairy tale like quality to the story that is told to students that their chosen field of study is ‘guaranteed’ to open up their career of choice, whereas as soon as they leave the bubble of realism kicks in and they find themselves not able to get a job at all , or only jobs that absolutely definitely didn’t require them to spend three years in more study getting a huge loan to boot.
I’ve been making all these arguments for years too – thank you for bringing it back into everyone’s awareness! Of course university is ‘real world’ – students are engaging in real social interactions, both positive and negative, with each other and with the employees of the university. It is a professional context – because it is our workplace as well as their place of study. And it is where students can develop their professional identities and their emerging networks that they will take with them out into different parts of the world and different careers. There’s something infantilising about saying university isn’t ‘real’.
I agree the term is derogatory, but only agree with the argument to a point because the University “bubble” does set students up with unrealistic expectations of the working world. That’s through no fault of their own, as Universities are providers being paid for a service, they are not an employer.
To give an example, where I work students can claim mitigating circumstances if they have been impacted by the war in the Iran. All they need to show is a connection to the area through their student record, or evidence of a familial connection and they can have a 2 week extension. One suspects if I approached an employer with the same issue, I would be handed a link to an Employee Support Service and told to see my GP. Not be given any practical support with my workload.