What do students expect at university?

By Marcus Wilson 05/09/2014

I've been reviewing some papers for an engineering education conference this week. I can't go into detail about any of them, because I've been given them in confidence to look at, but they have provoked some thoughts about the nature of university. Students come to university, to study physics or engineering or whatever, and what is it they expect to get? Is it the same as what we (the academic staff) expect to give them? It's an important question: remember students give three years of more of their life to getting a degree, and pay multi-thousands (and sometimes multi-tens-of-thousands) of dollars for the privelege. That's a huge commitment -so it's no surprise that students can feel very aggrieved when they don't receive what they are expecting to receive.  

An example of the tensions: As an academic, I try to get my students to a position where they can think through science for themselves, to be able to do their own learning, to reach their own conclusions. So I encourage students to go and find their own resources for supporting their papers, rather than just spoon-feed what I think they should be doing.  But (I know this from appraisals) spoon-feeding is what some students want and expect. "If I wanted to find my own resources, I can do that. If I wanted to do learning for myself I can sign-up to a MOOC for free. But I'm paying you to educate me, to give me resources that a MOOC or textbook can't.  So why are you not identifying and giving me the resources I need, telling me the answers to the questions, making my life easy for me?"

We might say in return "we are giving you what you need – you just don't recognize it yet." But it's a fair question, and I reckon maybe around 25% of students would sympathize to some extent with it. When I was an undergraduate, that kind of question never occured to me. However, I was very much aware that I was receiving an excellent education courtesy of the taxpayer – and, in fact, since it was in the days that the student grant still existed (just)  in the UK, the taxpayer was actually paying me to be educated at their expense. I expected to have to work hard at university. I expected to have to work through things myself and to take charge of my own learning. But now the whole landscape of education funding has changed. While the government still funds a considerable part of education, so do the students themselves. So what do they think they are going to get for their money and does it align with what we think we should be giving them?  How much effort (how many hours a week) do they expect to put in to their education? We might say 'full-time', but a student may reply "Yeah, right – I have to do paid work full-time to  get the money so I can live – where am I going to get the time to do 40 hours a week on my study too!" What do they expect their lecturers to do for them? 

Do we really know the answers to these questions? I would suggest that if we don't know what our students expect, we can't help them settle into university, we can't give them value for their money, and the drop-out rates at first year will remain stubbornly high.