One city, two different student experiences UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
Sussex and Brighton universities couldn’t be further apart in their post-Covid offering, finds Luke Mintz
It’s one of the last warm afternoons in September and, on the University of Sussex campus, you could just about imagine the pandemic never happened. Groups of 19 and 20-yearolds tap away on laptops, enjoying the sun from a grassy bank overlooking the network of brutalist buildings that caused such a stir when they were built in the hills outside Brighton in the early 1960s. A students’ union tent pumps out cheery pop music to mark the first week of term. Young women queue at a hipster coffee van, buying drinks – flat whites, roobois tea – their grandparents have never heard of.
Finally, it’s an opportunity for students to embark on what they describe as a “real university experience”: the colourful world of seminars, costume parties and late-night library sessions from which they’ve largely been excluded for the past 18 months, due to Covid.
“I feel blessed,” says English student Scott Wise, 22, as he sits on the library steps in a baseball cap. He is retaking his second year (and taking on an extra year’s worth of debt) because online learning made last year so dire. If the campus “felt dead” last summer, now “everyone’s smiling, happy. It’s amazing: you can hear fresh conversations between people, they’re just becoming friends.”
Wise is right to feel fortunate. Sussex is one of barely a handful of universities in the country that will return to a full roster of in-person teaching this academic year. Elsewhere, students have been told to expect a “blended” approach, in which many classes will remain online, despite Government advice that universities can lift Covid restrictions. Some universities maintain they will require masks and social distancing on campus; others will make students produce vaccine passports each time they enter a concert or club.
Earlier this month, the situation was described as “outrageous” by Lord Baker of Dorking, Margaret Thatcher’s former education secretary. “Pubs, cinemas, theatres and football matches have all opened without restrictions,” he said. “What’s different about universities?”
The divide cuts across varsity towns and cities. Just two miles away from Sussex’s buzzing campus is the University of Brighton, both of which charge the same fees (£9,250 a year for undergraduates – as per most English universities). But while Sussex has returned to real-world teaching, most lectures at Brighton remain onlineonly. “This will give our students the flexibility to study in a way that meets their individual needs and means their time on campus can be focused on interaction and activity with other students and staff,” a University of Brighton spokesman explains. Smaller group classes will take place in-person, and the campus is starting to open up, albeit with one-way systems in place.
The divide even cuts across households: Wise lives with a Brighton university student for whom most lectures will remain online; he admits he can’t help “feeling sorry” for his housemate.
Students are, by and large, fed up with online learning. A study by the National Union of Students last autumn found that 45 per cent were unhappy with the quality of their online learning; a separate Government report found that more than half of students reported their mental health and well-being worsening as a result of the pandemic. Virtually every educationalist you ask says that online learning is less effective than the traditional classroom experience.
Like most of her peers, Brighton
postgrad Sarah Tann, who is studying an MA in International Relations, became exhausted last year by the isolating, anti-social nature of online learning – an experience she will have to repeat in the coming academic year. She remembers struggling to get through online classes from her bedroom laptop, week after week.
“It’s different discussing [international relations] online,” says Tann, 25. “There’s a two-second delay on Microsoft Teams; it feels slightly awkward. You don’t get that awkwardness when you speak to people face-to-face. I know a lot of people who’ve deferred or dropped out – they just weren’t able to adjust to online learning. They’ve missed so much.”
It’s difficult to explain why universities have taken such wildly different approaches, says Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute. The varying demands of courses is probably a factor, as is s building design: some universities ities simply have larger, betterventilated lecture halls lls than others. And disabled students have ve long asked for an online option.
“We’ve been polling students throughout the crisis, and they’ve been telling us they prefer face-to-face teaching, on average,” Hillman says. “Students are paying a lot of money. y.
That comes with a set t of
rights, and the universities make a set of commitments. If those commitments are not being lived up to, there are things students can do to flex their consumer power.” He urges dissatisfied students to complain first to their university, or to the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education. But there may also be other, more controversial motivations at play. Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham, suggests that some universities are keeping courses online because they are frightened of losing valuable fees from overseas students, who are barred from the UK by Covid restrictions – especially those from China.
“Universities have become very dependent on the income from overseas students,” says Prof Smithers. “They’ll go out of their way to accommodate them. In theory, you can teach some in-person and some online. But, in my experience, it doesn’t work particularly well to try to combine the two. So some universities, especially where the teaching is lecture and tutorial-based, are concentrating on online teaching.” He adds it is “absolutely” fair for British students to feel aggrieved. Students hoped this September might mark a return to normality after the awfulness of the past academic year – probably the worst period to be a student in living memory.
Back at the University of Sussex, students feel confident that such misery is behind them – and they are certainly lucky to have ended up on the right side of the online versus real-world divide. Helin Cetin, 22, a Biology student, is excited to return to the laboratory to examine insects and bacteria.
“Biology’s a very hands-on subject, it requires in-person learning,” she tells me. “When you come out of a lecture, you want to discuss it, to hear other people’s opinions and try to understand
‘I know a lot of people who’ve dropped out – they couldn’t adjust to online learning’
what you just learned.” During online learning last year, she says “it was very difficult to stay motivated, every day merges into one. It’s not productive learning when I’m in bed at 9am, half-asleep, watching a lecture.” She believes some of her classmates may have developed social anxiety due to the lack of human connection.
As Covid keeps receding, Prof Smithers is confident that British universities will drift back to their pre-pandemic state. “Gradually, we’ll be able to open up our borders and the overseas students will come in and in-person teaching will resume.”
But students won’t easily forget which universities have shone during this crisis – and which ones they feel let them down.