Across the country, university students are packing up bags and boxes, and going off into the world, having completed their studies. They are, however, leaving without being awarded the degree for which they have worked so hard.
Our universities are acting as if this farce is perfectly normal and to be expected in the world of British academia, saying “due to the marking boycott, degrees will be awarded at a later date in absentia”.
Exams are unmarked, dissertations are unread, causing uncertainty over job offers, and putting plans for postgraduate studies on hold. The degrees for which these young people worked so hard, already interrupted by strikes and Covid, consisted mainly of recorded online lectures, PowerPoints and zoom calls.
For this privilege, young people paid £27,000, plus maintenance and other costs. Many parents as well as students find themselves in debt supporting their children through university.
British universities, our proudest export? With the focus on the money overseas students can bring taking priority over all else, do we really think today’s students would agree? They see universities treating them as nothing more than cash cows.
“We have taken your money, you had your recorded lectures, thank you and goodbye.”
We see Vice Chancellors earning over £500kpa but who apparently feel no sense of obligation to the students who make this possible. The student, the paying consumer, has become a peripheral irrelevance to the British higher education scam.
There has been silence from the Department of Education, who are not fighting for students. There has been no parliamentary time allocated to this issue, no statement from the Secretary of State. It is the responsibility of the Department to resolve the concerns of students and they seem unwilling to tackle the issue. The Secretary of State, who famously has never been a student, seems entirely unperturbed.
Parliament has been too busy grandstanding about a former Prime Minister who left office a year ago to focus its attention on the young people emerging into an uncertain world, with nothing to show for their money and time.
For those thousands of students who fought hard to secure a place at university, who saw higher education as a route to a better life, and who from day one set themselves a goal of a first-class degree, this is a complete betrayal. It is not just the marking boycott, it is that no one cares and no one is taking responsibility.
A Durham university student in my constituency said:
“My university years are precious to me because they are so hard won. I was homeless at 16 and spent my sixth form years surfing sofas, working minimum wage jobs to support myself. For kids like me a degree is a golden ticket to a route out of poverty. But now it feels that is has been jeopardised and no one cares.”
Students have a right to be awarded their degree and it is incumbent on universities to deliver. These young people start out on day one excited, passionate, ready to learn. They leave three years later, disillusioned, with a sense of impotence at the lack of interest universities have shown in them, their learning, or their future.
Today’s students are the workforce of the future, the people we will rely on to deliver the productivity our economy so desperately needs and the people who will pay the pensions of an aging population.
This is how we treat them.
Lucy Allan is the MP for Telford. She was a member of the House of Commons Education Select Committee from 2015 – 2019. She was educated at Durham University and Kingston Law School.
