Over the last few months, we’ve noticed how there has been much said about students but scant feedback from students themselves.
We wondered, for example, what were students’ expectations for uni life under covid restrictions? And have these expectations been met?
After all, it’s often not experience itself that makes us unhappy, but rather the expectation that things would be different. This makes us feel worse than we would if we’d had no expectations at all, and is especially true under new or unusually stressful situations.
The survey
We wanted to dig into some of these specific issues with students from our community, and since the debate around refunds continues, we asked a single question to students who receive our newsletter:
Do you believe your university should provide a tuition fee refund or compensation of some kind as a result of current Covid restrictions?
We included the option for students to expand on their answer and 88% of respondents did, providing sentences and sentences of detail about their opinion. It’s clear that students want to talk!
The findings
While universities are doing their best to manage expectations and communicate with students, it seems that many students are feeling disappointed when it comes to their current university experience.
And while students were pretty united on the idea that university staff – especially support staff – are doing their very best in what are extremely difficult times, they had plenty to say about what wasn’t working.
The report includes students’ thoughts on:
- How remote learning has been executed
- Online support provisions
- The closing of social spaces and other facilities
On balance, the things that didn’t meet expectations have led the overwhelming majority of students to believe that some form of compensation is in order. See the breakdown and read students’ feedback and suggestions here.
We hope you find the report informative!
We get the same amount of teaching but the quality has changed. We also don’t have access to university resources such as the clinical classrooms for courses that rely on this kind of teaching and libraries. For those on courses such as nursing and midwifery we cannot make all of the lectures online due to working placement, it’s not fair to pay for something that you cannot access.
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