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Thursday, 5 June 2025

The future of university

 I think i've had a really good idea (this happens a lot). Finally figured out how to make my millions. 

Universities are in crisis, student numbers are falling, and there is a lot of hand wringing about what universities are for. I think its time to repurpose some of the universities as for-profit assisted living centres for 19-25 year olds.

Hear me out.

I think a lot of academics radically overestimate the significance of education, in university life. The average a-level student goes to university because its a way of easing themselves into adulthood. A sort of staging zone in between childhood and independence. A-level students live in a house that is cleaned and paid for by someone else. Their days are timetabled by teachers and parents. They are fed, and generally cared for like a domesticated pet.  Few of them would last long if suddenly required to live alone in a flat with a full time job. University is a way for them to ease into gently. They can start off in halls, with company and catering, if they wish. The university timetable offers an intermediate between full autonomy and day care. They have to manage their budget for the first time, but they still have the protection of various guard rails and support systems such as hardship funds and counselling services and dedicated gp services. Once there, most students find identity-forming friendships, start new hobbies, figure out how to boil pasta and learn how to phone utilities companies, so that by the time they are ejected into the real world, 3-5 years later, they are a little bit less like newborn deer trying to find their legs under the gaze of a world hungry for young, naive, meat.

For a lot of students, their education is actually a minority element of their university experience. They are far more occupied by their social lives, their sports, their love life, the demos they join and the fashion they explore. And i'm 100% not saying this in a derogatory spirit. University offers a wonderful environment in which young people can flourish, find themselves, and launch themselves into society. They find valuable political causes. They acquire all sorts of random extracurricular experience. They make friends who become lifetime allies, contacts and sources of support. They achieve independence from their families and meet people different from those they grew up with.

Most of my university friends now have amazing impressive careers. and most of those have no connection to the degree they took. But they are connected to the causes they volunteered for while at university. Most of them could not have made it into those careers without the experiences they had at university. It's just that the experiences in question were nothing to do with their academic program of study. 

So i'm always emphasizing to my tutees that university is much more than just the academic stuff, and they should allow plenty of space in their timetable to make the most of all the extracurrciular stuff on offer, to make the friends that could be their way into a career one day, to use all the subsidised services on offer.

Of course i'm not of the view that academic education is worthless. The ability to read and write well, to understand complex ideas and develop arguments, never mind the actual factual content of many courses is priceless. but i still think we overestimate the importance of everyone doing it.

I think there is space for another option - university without the lessons. Include the halls, the mentors, the support systems, the extracurricular activities, the beautiful inspiring campus. and reduce the fee. We should start giving young people the opportunity to do uni without the classes. 

Maybe there could be extra elements built in to make it seem more tangibly beneficial, and to stop them all sliding entirely into alcoholic chaos. Three years of different volunteering gigs maybe? or the society roles, student paper and what not could be beefed up. Maybe they could do vocational training like apprenticeships, but still get the campus experience. 

Assisted living for 19-25 year olds. An 18+ summer camp, but it runs september to may. and save ourselves a lot of 2:2 marking in the process. Now i just need some rich people to get in touch and offer to pay to make this happen.

2 comments:

  1. Never mind 19-25yr olds. I wouldn't mind doing that now, at 45!

    ReplyDelete
  2. hmm yeah come to mention it, maybe i just reinvented butlins?

    ReplyDelete