There are times when I find myself pawing at the window, wondering what the outside world is like. My housemate shouts “bye” up the stairs and trots down for another evening at the pub.
This same housemate has been sitting on the sofa all three times that I have returned home from university. She can often be found eating or playing the Playstation. In fact she often does both simultaneously.
I know that I will hear her come home, and I will still be in the same place when she left hours ago. Except, I won’t be watching endless repeats of Friends and Scrubs on E4, but furiously scribbling down notes from a book.
I could waste time and walk downstairs and plan to make something edible, but I know that I will just have forgotten to go food shopping again.
This cycle has been repeating itself more frequently recently and I find myself continuously explaining where I have been for the past month to the curious faces I once knew.
“I’ve had a lot of work on.” The pub population will then nod in agreement, except many have not been into lectures today, or even the day before. I smile politely and wonder if they really have a clue.
Other times I find myself gazing around our law lectures, which we share with law students, and wonder where they all are. They have very few lessons a week, why can’t they make it in for their one-hour lecture?
I have friends scattered around the country, being taught by lecturers who don’t know their names and others who grumble because they have one 10am start in their three-day week.
In many ways I envy them as my early morning alarm goes off, five days a week, but then realise that they are paying thousands of pounds for some half-arsed degree.
I don’t see how a degree, which involves spending more time drinking and sleeping, is going to enhance the economy. Except in regards to alcohol sales.
So whilst the lecturers’ University and College Union have said fewer graduates would not benefit the economy, I don’t think half of your current students are going to improve it either.
The issue of “what is a degree for” and related concerns about fees came up on a first year module just last week. There was a faintly social Darwinist-sounding idea doing the rounds, suggesting that if fees went up, the students who are always down the pub would leave university.
The problem seems to me to be one where we’ve got higher education and employment so tangled up, that we lose sight of what the former is for. So the ‘how it benefits the economy’-type argument is ultimately self-defeating. As you (rightly) say, when student loans, progress bursaries and Educational Maintenance Allowances are getting spent on booze, it does transfer some money into the drinks industry, producing a revenue stream for one sector of the economy. Many a true word spoken in jest.
Pause for thought. These economic arguments don’t answer this question: why bother with university at all? If one wants the spending, why not hand over the money directly? If one wants the cuts, why not let students fund their own studies entirely? Either way, the questions ‘why study?’, ‘why teach?’ aren’t being addressed directly.
And just to contribute to the argument – one of my friends at the University of Kent at Canterbury has had enough time in her spare hours to learn the value of pi to 65 decimal places.
Jealous much.