Who would want to be a university student right now?

Forbidden from face-to-face learning for another month and paying at least £9,000 a year for the privilege, young people are hopping mad, says Victoria Lambert

AWhat kind of customer is it, who doesn’t get an automatic rebate on substandard goods or services?

s young people emerge from lockdown to play football, go to the pub, socialise and work, all legally, there is one thing they are still forbidden to do: broaden their minds in person.

That glittering prize – a human-tohuman university education – is still not allowed. Students may live in their college accommodation and drink outside the local bars, but attend a lecture? That’ll be a no. Not even an extravagantly socially distanced, fully PPE-ED, sanitised-toan-inch-of-your-life lecture. It’s too much of a risk, says the Government.

Instead, students who are not studying a course that has a particular practical element (for example medicine or education) have been told that in-person teaching will not resume until May 17 at the earliest. That’s about five weeks away – and only a fortnight before exams are due to begin for many.

For first-year students, it means their entry into higher education will end as it started: under a Covid cloud. And for final-year students, well, you can imagine the cramming – both academic and social – they’ll want to get through before they graduate (in whatever Covid-compliant shape that takes).

We shouldn’t underestimate how tough this is.

Sabrina Miller, in her final year studying English at the University of Bristol, says the past year has been incredibly challenging. “This latest announcement is the cherry on top,” she says. “I hand in my final university assignment on May 12, so will never have another seminar again.

“I’ve spent more time at home than at university.

The Government has completely abandoned those of us in higher education.”

No wonder Miller and many thousands of her peers are hopping mad. Perhaps the only surprise is that their response has been so measured. There have been moments over the past year when frustrations have boiled over – students tore down the Covid-fencing at the University of Manchester last autumn, for example. But would anyone have been surprised if more vocal protests had occurred?

Let’s not forget these are not children being subsidised by the state to learn, as in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These are the heirs to the millennial makeover of higher education, which made students into paying customers, able to shop around for what they wanted, with universities put under notice that standards had to rise and “Mickey Mouse” degrees were to end.

What kind of customer is it, who doesn’t get an automatic rebate on sub-standard goods or services? Students are still paying their £9,000 a year – only now it is for the privilege of lessons conducted online.

And they understand – now from reality, not just supposition – that this type of learning cannot replace the educational experience of in-person discussions: the seminars where you can have a good row, the chance conversations on the way to the library, that

Eureka moment when a lecture room all gets the same revelation.

The university experience has always been a delightful paradox: it is about books while being about so much more than books. It is about abstract discussion and personal experience, individual growth and collective relationships, exploration and consolidation. It’s also as much about what happens in the lecture hall as what happens in the student union afterwards.

This is at the heart of the implied contract of a university education, and it’s why young people mortgage themselves to the hilt in signing up for it. Yet universities, while being hugely sympathetic to their clients’ concerns in many ways, are sticking firm about one aspect: the money.

Yesterday, when Debra Humphris, Vice Chancellor of the University of Brighton, was challenged on Radio 4’s Today programme on whether students should get rebates, she replied that, on the contrary, students were “receiving the best possible education we can provide”, and that everyone should remember we are in the “middle of a global pandemic”.

There’s no doubt that this is a difficult path for universities to tread.

They are businesses that must balance the students’ complaints about money with strict rules around financing that are set in Westminster.

However, there is surely a huge danger now that the pool of potential students will dry up. A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine a conversation with one of my friends when the subject of where our children would go for their higher education didn’t come up. Now, we are far more likely to discuss whether they should be looking for an apprenticeship or other vocational route.

As for the young people who do choose to go to university in the coming years, what courses will they want to sit?

As it stands, our higher education system has effectively cleaved in two, with practical courses continuing while humanities stall. What message has it sent to the next generation, the potential art historians at St Andrews, the geographers at Reading, the Oxbridge literary students?

It’s no exaggeration to say we could be looking at an unforced shrinkage of our lauded, world-class higher education sector. Frankly, we should all be up in arms.