‘Spoon-fed’ students lack resilience needed at Oxbridge

Oxford and Cambridge students are struggling to cope with the pressures of studying at a top university, according to Guy Claxton. Photo: GETTY

Oxford and Cambridge are both reporting a rise in referrals to university counselling services amid claims new students lack the “resilience” to get through degree courses.

Professor Guy Claxton, author of the book Building Learning Power, said teenagers were increasingly led through bite-sized GCSEs and A-levels by teachers – gaining a string of straight A grades and winning places at top universities.

But he warned that many then suffered a culture shock as they struggled to cope with the increased demands of higher education.

According to figures, up to a fifth Cambridge students are referred to counsellors at some point during their degree, he said.

Addressing a conference, Prof Claxton, co-director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at Winchester University, said: “[Oxford and Cambridge] are seeing a year-on-year rise in the number of young people who arrive apparently confident, with four to five As at A-level, but lacking resilience, lacking the ability to cope if they do not get great success.

“Fifteen to 20 per cent of Cambridge students will find their way to the counsellors’ waiting room – 1,200 did so last year at Oxford.

“They are very clear that these high-achieving youngsters are becoming more and more vulnerable because they are being spoon-fed more and more efficiently by their teachers to get them through their exams.

“There is more modularisation, more packaging and learning is more chopped up.”

Many academics have complained that students are starting university lacking the independence and basic inquiry skills needed to get by on a degree course.

At some universities, traditional three-year degrees have been extended by 12 months to teach the skills that students failed to learn at school and college.

Most GCSEs and A-levels are currently broken up into bite-sized modules that students can re-sit to boost their overall grades.

But last month the Coalition pledged to scrap modular courses at GCSE to give pupils more exposure to “deep learning”.

Senior figures at Oxford and Cambridge’s counselling services told the Times Educational Supplement that many students felt like failures if they struggled to understand difficult issues.

Mark Phippen, head of Cambridge’s counselling service, said: “We are quite aware of the number of students who are obviously very academically able but paradoxically lack confidence.

“That may come about from no longer being a large fish in a small pond, but also people being less prepared to take on challenges without others helping them out.”

Alan Percy, clinical director of Oxford’s counselling service, told the TES: “The kind of conversation I often have with a lot of clients is that students often don’t grasp the full meaning of learning.

“Learning is finding out something that you did not know and struggling with it. It’s almost as if, if they do not know something immediately they feel as though they are failing.”

Welsh students to be spared tuition fee increase

Students in Wales will pay just over 3,000 for a degree from 2012, while charges in England rise as high as 9,000.

Some 90,000 students a year will have degree courses heavily subsidised by the Welsh Assembly Government following fears that fee increases could turn school leavers off higher education.

It means students from Wales will continue paying just over £3,000 to attend university while those in England are charged up to £9,000.

The move came as students clashed with police in London as part of a third major protest against fee rises.

Demonstrations also took place in Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol and dozens of protesters occupied university buildings.

Leighton Andrews, the Welsh Education Minister, said fee reforms would be funded by cutting the direct teaching grant for Welsh universities.

Devolved governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland are yet to make decisions on the future of university funding.

But the latest announcement was criticised by campaigners amid claims that English taxpayers are effectively being asked to subsidise cheaper courses elsewhere in Britain.

Funding for Wales is channelled through Westminster. But public spending per head was 14 per cent higher in Wales in 2007/8 than England, according to The TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Emma Boon, the group’s campaign director, said: “Graduates derive a significant financial gain across their lifetime from their degree and so it is right that they should contribute towards the cost of their university education.

“It’s completely unfair to expect those taxpayers who do not go to university to subsidise those who do, that includes English taxpayers funding Welsh students’ fees.”

The Coalition announced last month that the cap on tuition fees in England would soar from £3,290 this year to between £6,000 and £9,000 in 2012.

At the same time, direct funding for most university courses will be cut as responsibility for paying for degrees is transferred to individual students.

On Tuesday, Mr Andrews said universities in Wales would also be able to increase tuition fees to £9,000, but Welsh students would not be expected to bear the extra cost.

They will pay the same fees in 2012 as they do in 2010, it was disclosed, as the Government steps in to subsidise courses.

“Welsh domiciled students will not have to find either £6,000 or £9,000 to study,” he said. “The public purse will continue to subsidise higher education for Welsh domiciled students.”

He added: “Higher education should be on the basis of the individual’s potential to benefit, and not on the basis of what they can afford to pay.”

The subsidy will apply to Welsh students taking courses anywhere in Britain. Some 69,690 students currently study in Wales and another 18,475 are at universities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

English undergraduates taking courses in Wales will be expected to pay full costs.

Fees in Northern Ireland are currently capped at £3,290 and Stormont will consult on changes early next year.

Scottish students do not pay fees although a discussion document on possible reforms to the system will be published in coming weeks.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: “I am pleased that the Welsh Assembly Government has recognised that access to higher education should be on based academic ability not ability to pay.

“It is a shame that the Coalition Government hasn’t grasped this reality and that it is persisting with its deeply flawed strategy.

“There is nothing fair or progressive about asking students to pay more for a university education and saddling them with a lifetime of debt.

“If fees are allowed to go up to £6,000 or more, England will be the most expensive country in the developed world in which to study at a public university.”

Record numbers of British students ‘studying in US’

Some 8,861 students crossed the Atlantic to study at US institutions in 2009/10 – a two per cent increase in 12 months.

Experts warned that numbers were likely to soar further in coming years because of a rise in British tuition fees combined with a shortage of undergraduate places.

The conclusions come just weeks after it was announced that the cap on tuition fees will almost triple from £3,290 to £9,000 within two years.

This summer, as many as a third of students failed to get onto a degree course following a record rise in applications.

The Fulbright Commission, which promotes transatlantic study and research, said students increasingly saw American universities as a viable alternative to studying in Britain.

Lauren Welch, director of advising, said: “British students and parents are feeling the squeeze between rising tuition and budget cuts at UK universities.

“The gap is closing rapidly between tuition rates in both countries, and students are going to study where they can get the most bang for their buck.

“Many students are saying when you’re already paying up to £9,000, what’s another £3,000 to study in the States?”

She added: “When one in three UCAS applicants did not get a place last August, it sent off alarm bells at dinner tables right around the country. More students are throwing their hats into the ring in other countries to increase their chances of having at least one offer come next summer.”

A study published today by the Institute for International Education showed a rise in the number of British students studying in the US. This came despite a drop in admissions from the rest of Europe.

The number of British students taking undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the US increased by two per cent, it emerged.

At the same time, there was a four per cent drop in European students, including a 12 per cent fall at undergraduate level.

Financial Planning for Graduate Students

The Master of Public Administration Student Association (MPASA) is hosting an event on Thursday, November 4 that all graduate students are encouraged to attend. Bonnie A. Hughes of American Capital Planning will lead a discussion about graduate student financial health and issues at 7:00 in the Craig Hall Auditorium. Ms. Hughes will discuss a variety of topics including student loans, first jobs, financial goals and saving for retirement.

For more information, visit the Facebook event page or the MPA page.

University Clearing: Students, the world wants you

In a sort of reverse Dunkirk operation, universities from France, Holland and even Germany, sought to transmit the message that they were prepared to rescue students whose hopes of college entry lay beached and washed up on British shores.

Forget your ill-fated application to do animal husbandry and particle physics at the College of the North Circular, urged the University of Maastricht; come to our picturesque hillside town (population 120,000), where instead of snakebite and White Lightning, the student binge drink of choice is an elegant herbal gin, or jenever, mixed with an aromatic wheat beer, Wyckse Witte.

Why lament getting the cold shoulder from a windblown UK campus, asked Parisian universities, when you could be smoking Gauloises and discussing Sartre in an atmospheric student café on the Rue Mouffetard?

Traditionally when faced with such blatant overseas blandishments, British parents have told their offspring to take no notice, darling, and walk on. Now, though, in a departure from our normal refrain about foreigners coming over and taking our jobs, we are starting to talk in more upbeat, even grateful tones, about them coming over here and taking our students.

On Monday, representatives from the San Raffaele Medical School, in Milan, are setting up for a day at Imperial College, London, where they will be touting for students. On September 25, the Yanks are taking over Kensington Town Hall; 100 of the biggest and best US colleges will spend the day recruiting undergraduates. Then in February, University College London plays host to the QS Top Universities Tour, which involves the world’s academic powerhouses attempting to win over our most promising young minds. Not so much a milk run, as a creaming-off.

In the past, all this would have been unthinkable; back in the 1970s, the most exotic course a young Brit might contemplate was brewing at Heriot-Watt. Now, though, a panorama of possibilities is opening up.

And it’s not just a matter of choosing a foreign university based on fuzzy notions like Germany is good for engineering, or Sweden is good for sociology. Just as schools have league tables, so do universities. Consult the QS World University Rankings Guide (www.topuniversities.com), and you get data far harder and more penetrating than in any glossy prospectus.

Not only are the institutions graded overall, from No 1 (Harvard) and No 2 (Cambridge) to No 399 (University of Bremen), but they are given marks in respect of everything from speciality subjects to staff-pupil ratios, from their postgraduate research performance to the esteem (or otherwise) in which they are held by potential employers.

Suddenly, the choice of universities open to British pupils is no longer limited to red-brick or concrete-and-glass, but includes Dutch-gable, Alpine-log and even mud hut (if you’re doing anthropology).

Once upon a time, we would never have considered such a wide, and frighteningly foreign range of options. Two things, though, have changed. First, the national attitude towards university entrance has altered, in the space of just a few months, from All Shall Go to None Shall Pass. Second, the fees have gone up.

Also, while the cost of going to a British university is £3,000 and set to rise, the fees for many European universities have, amazingly, remained earthbound. An undergraduate year at Maastricht University (rated 116th in the world) costs £1,500 in fees, while at the Technical University of Munich, (rated 55th in the world), it’s just £845, and at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris (rated 28), the annual bill is a jaw-dropping £160.

Astonishingly, these bargain-basement prices are available to us too. Thanks to the European Union and its newly created European Higher Education Area, degrees at many European universities not only synchronise with British qualifications (ie a BA in France is the same as a BA in England), but the cost to us is exactly the same as to the locals. Even Scottish students are afforded the same rate, despite their hardly generous policy on fees (non-Scots pay them, Scots don’t)

Sacrébleu, as they say in France. At long last, instead of telling us what fish we can catch and how bendy our bananas can be, the EU has introduced a ruling which might actually be of some benefit to us.

It gets even better: an increasing number of these courses are conducted in English, our language having had the good fortune to achieve world domination without us firing a shot. Not that continental universities are doing this to be nice to us, mind you; it’s just that if they want to appeal to an international clientele (and more and more do), then they have to put on courses in a language everyone will understand.

Of course, there are plenty of non-European universities which use English, too. And whereas in the past, American (£20,000 a year) and Australian fees (£10,000) have been prohibitively high, the differential may no longer be so large, should our rates go up (and everyone says they will).

The only downside, is that you can’t take out a student loan to pay overseas fees. On the plus side, though, the Australian and New Zealand academic year starts in February, so if you’ve missed out in the UK, you’ve got till October to submit your application to, say, the University of Canberra (rated 17) or Auckland (61).

Nor does the list of global options end there. The internationalisation process has led to some unlikely academic pairings: Bolton University is offering unsuccessful UK applicants a chance to go instead to its sister Ras Al Khaimah campus in Dubai.

Meanwhile, Nottingham University has sprouted two identical-twin institutions on the other side of the world: one at Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, the other at Ningbo, near Shanghai (all lessons in English, fees £9,000-£12,500 per year). Both offer bona fide Nottingham University degrees, plus genuine architectural echoes of the East Midlands.

Even more unconventionally, you could go to an international university, without leaving the country. The American InterContinental University in London offers degrees not in traditional academic disciplines, but in globally “portable” subjects that can convert into careers (fashion, business, interior design and visual communications).

However, the most appealing option must be the travel and tourism degree at the University of Central Florida. As well as providing undergraduates with what amounts to an apprenticeship in a growing industry, it includes a work experience secondment to Disneyworld in Orlando.

Time was, that would have been thought a Mickey Mouse degree. But not any more.