Category: Students

  • The labour of being a student nurse

    The labour of being a student nurse

    It’s 5:15pm and I’ve just finished an extra shift on placement to meet my required 2300 hours. I haven’t had time to change out of my nursing uniform.

    I had to support a deteriorating patient, a patient who was dying, and a patient that needed a new catheter as an emergency – otherwise they could have died too. And then I remembered I was running late to a board of governors’ meeting.

    I run in and apologise: scrubs on, hair ragged, eyes puffy, pouring the first glass of water I have managed to drink since 8am that morning.

    I explain I need to leave a bit early for patient bedtime calls. People were surprised, and suddenly the focus was away from the agenda and the questions flooded. I began to explain what it is really like to be a student nurse.

    I explained about the unpaid placement hours, dealing with real life patients and people who rely on us in some of their most vulnerable moments. The full time studying, having to work alongside it all and the toll on our mental and physical health. I was just scratching the surface.

    According to the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), more than 32,000 student nurses could drop out of their courses by the next parliament and seven in ten are considering quitting due to financial pressures. Statistics like these don’t surprise me, instead they reflect me and my colleagues’ experiences.

    Ultimately, institutions and governments can’t support student nurses, increase numbers and reduce retention issues if they first don’t understand their experience.

    It’s a full-time job on top of a full-time job

    We are told studying a full-time degree is a full-time job. Many students are now working more hours part- or full-time to fill the gap left by an inadequate student maintenance system, but what about student nurses?

    Student nurses juggle between 37.5 and 48 hours a week of unpaid work placements – and also work part-time jobs because the cost of living is so tough. We see student nurses rely on the free tea and toast in the staff rooms as their only source of nutrition for the day.

    In August I was on a five-day week placement. I had hours I had to make up as I was unable to attend a period of placement earlier that year due to my mum being treated for cancer. For student nurses, every time we encounter a barrier, the first thing we think about is the hours we’ll need to make up.

    We’re not entitled to sick pay, special leave or bereavement when it comes to placement. At the time of writing, I am currently on my ninth straight working day, between placement and my job as a sabbatical officer. My rent is due, my bills need paying – this is survival.

    Is it even worth it?

    It’s understandable that nursing students often feel like they exist in a limbo between the university they’re studying at and their placements. Where the student journey is so different, there needs to be different or specialised support to ensure nursing students can succeed.

    Nursing students don’t have the ability to commit to all the things that enrich the student experience – clubs, societies or volunteering – because they don’t have the time for it.

    It makes many question if they can ever actually just be students.

    In a context of an incredibly challenged health care system, student nurses are being asked to do more and more before they are qualified. As future healthcare professionals who signed up for these degrees because we want to take care of others, we are in positions where we can’t care for ourselves.

    The labour of being a student nurse feels heavy but that’s not to say that there isn’t room to make positive change.

    To universities, talk to your healthcare students, celebrate their differences from other students but acknowledge the challenge it can bring. By understanding them and lobbying on their behalf they’ll feel validated and supported by their institution.

    Looking to the government, with future reform of the NHS on the government’s agenda, how will you look at the whole student nurse journey before focusing on only recruitment? Working with trade unions including the RCN to improve the immediate conditions of student nurses is an important first step to ensure retention.

    This could include student discounts on food in hospital trusts, travel bursaries, and flexible working regulations. In order to increase recruitment in the long term, the government should consider livable bursaries and the introduction of a loan forgiveness scheme.

    It’s important that both the health sector and the higher education sector look after our future NHS and healthcare workforce. Because no matter who you are or where you come from, in yours’ or your loved one’s time of need, we want to always be there to help you.

    We’ll only see progress once there is a joined up approach from universities and government to improve the experience, and that starts with better understanding the labour of being a student nurse.

    Source link

  • Lessons for leaders from the campus encampments

    Lessons for leaders from the campus encampments

    It’s neither a personal nor an especially novel observation to suggest that both in the UK and across North America and Western Europe, debates about campus climate, culture and freedom of speech were upended on 7 October 2023.

    It’s not the purpose of the report, but you can really feel some of the contradictions coming to a head in Josh Freeman’s terrific new HEPI report on the Encampments protesting for Palestine and the response to them, tentatively timed to offer early reflections now that a ceasefire has been secured.

    What until October 7 had been a rhetorically wide framing of freedom of speech and a pretty narrow one over protection from harm and harassment was always going to be challenged when speech took the form of pro-Palestine placards rather than the punch and judy of rarified Russell Group debating societies.

    And while plenty of people still pretend that there are no “fine lines” and contradictions between, say, expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity and antisemitism, Freeman’s report lays out the realities and complexities of universities, their students’ unions and students themselves being expected to tread and police those lines.

    I was struck, reading the report, by the contradictions between the way in which student “debaters” (the subject of a previous report from Freeman) and student activists of the sort in the encampments are often framed in terms of what they represent – the former is often assumed to be a near-universal experience or at least an ideal, while the latter are painted as an angry mob that often aren’t even students anyway.

    Both, in truth, are pretty unrepresentative of the contemporary higher education experience, both can seem like indulgences that many students are unable to afford, but both do have an influence on students’ understanding of the world. The fact that both appear to be largely confined to the Russell Group could easily be a source of shame rather than relief.

    Motivations and disruptions

    There’s a good methodology to the report that some tend to turn their nose up at when used on other issues – it’s basically a qualitative, case study-based approach, drawing on lived experiences through semi-structured interviews with key players – student protestors, university staff, students’ union officers, and Jewish students – while triangulating these insights with documentary analysis of public statements and social media discourse.

    As a result, there are some fascinating insights from Freeman. Fairly early on, he notes that in the student interviews, many were motivated by factors which, at least at face value, went far beyond the situation in Gaza – referring to other factors like islamophobia, tuition fees, staff pay and pensions, mental health or even the freedom to protest:

    These issues were rarely mentioned in encampments’ official demands but they appear to have been significant motivators to join the protests.

    There’s also a clutch of material on the way in which the encampments themselves operated – laying bare both aspects and incidents of obvious antisemitism, but also anguish about the right (and for some, perceived duty) to object to and highlight the actions of Israel throughout the war, and the way in which those protestors knew that that might be misinterpreted.

    Material on “disruption” is interesting too. Freeman identifies both an oft-denied truism – that this kind of “speech” is designed to be disruptive – and a less-understood concern of some protestors that keeping students on side by not excessively disrupting their education was important.

    The section on the “institutional response” is particularly helpful, mainly because it draws comparisons in the approach on engagement. The running theme is that where – either by chance or by design – institutional managers and student protesters were caused to meet and discuss as people, some inching away from simplistic demonisation was possible and helpful. By contrast, it looks like a lack of engagement allowed a simplistic framing – of protester as terrorist, and university manager as oppressor – to unhelpfully persist.

    Freeman also reflects on the learning made possible by those encounters:

    The ultimate goals of discussions should be learning, on the one hand – these examples suggest institutions still have much to learn from their students – and explaining, on the other, why some demands are not feasible.

    Another aspect of the diversity in approaches relates to “demands”. The old “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” approach to students can be seen in this quote:

    It would create two categories of students … it would give them a carte blanche for any kind of behaviour.

    …while others were perceptive enough to recognise that hard and fast rules can look quite silly quite quickly when it’s often context that counts:

    It’s a special situation, an emotional issue. It’s okay to call this a one-off. Though some have said we are setting a bad precedent by allowing this behaviour.

    That’s true too over a running theme in the narrative amongst protesters – that taking an early and unequivocal stance on Ukraine in the way that most of the sector did was, for them, incompatible with a sudden concern for neutrality over Israel/Palestine.

    Frustratingly, Freeman even reports that after accusations of being “hypocrites”, “several” senior staff said that, on reflection, their institutions would avoid political statements entirely in the future – as if carefully crafted regulations will always trump context. They won’t.

    I’d also tentatively add that while it was undoubtedly true that:

    …In comparison with the Marking and Assessment Boycott, there is tiny traffic from students. To the bulk of our students, it [the conflict] is not on their radar. We have had a few hundred emails on divestment, but they are the same people writing over and over, with the same template.

    …one might argue that a huge international conflict, with significant global implications, might cause one to wonder why more students weren’t engaged, particularly in universities where “activism” is more a rarity than a rhythm.

    Threats, reputation and officialdom

    There are, inevitably, some pointed observations both about government and the Office for Students – which to this day has said almost nothing about so many of the edge cases of freedom v harm involved in Israel/Palestine, despite being in the process of launching two new “sandbags on the see saw” in the form of free speech duties and anti-harassment duties.

    Universities – perhaps it was always thus – were neither to be trusted nor offered much in the way of help when being left to resolve the tensions themselves:

    They’ve left us to it. That may have been the best thing.

    In a week when student activists appear to have brought down a populist Prime Minister in Serbia, I was also especially interested in Freeman’s observations about the relationship between what we might call the “official” voice of students – students’ unions – and the activists in the encampments.

    Before I even got to page 35, for example, I knew that words to this effect would appear somewhere:

    We engage with the Students’ Union as they are the democratically elected representatives, not with some small group of people, most of whom have nothing to do with the University or its community.

    I would note in eyebrow-raising passing that I’ve often come across that view from those who tend, in other contexts, to challenge the representativeness of their students’ union when advancing recommendations or opinions.

    But more broadly, I tend to adopt a straightforward principle when an organised group of students decides that the “official” channel of communication isn’t cutting the mustard – they often have a point. That’s partly because, back on that “hard and fast rule” thing, some SUs (and their universities) can take their apoliticism and desire to be seen to be supporting all students too far – overcooking reputational or charity law fears, and undercooking their role as clearing houses for often opposed student opinion.

    When Freeman recommends that:

    Distinguishing between the collective position of the students’ union on the one hand and the stances of individual elected officers on the other, so elected officers can remain true to their own views and the mandate they were elected on, while allowing the students’ union to remain apolitical, follow charity law and be representative of the wider student body.

    …it also seems fairly clear that the “own views” aspect of that doesn’t mean silence in the way that has been imposed for many an SU officer with strong views on the issues.

    Mediation and advocacy

    What’s helpful in the report is the description of the positive role that many SU officers and staff played in the process as mediators (supporting both encampments and institutions to reach a resolution), as intermediaries (passing “intelligence” between encampments and institutions), and as advocates to make sure the voices of all students are heard roles that many of their staff (outside a handful) are neither routinely funded for nor recognised.

    And as Freeman puts it when discussing allegations of illegitimacy:

    But rather than undermining the positions of elected officers, it might be more productive to work with the SU to create an effective process for dialogue with all groups of students. When the main mechanism for students to contribute to institutional policy does not function properly, it may explain why many students choose to bypass their unions and channel their frustrations through protest.

    I discussed some of the differences between what we might call the “official” student movement and the activists leading the blockades in Serbia in my write up on that issue elsewhere on the site – and I’m struck by the character of the past 18 months’ pro-Palestinian activism when compared to previous intensifications of the Middle East conflict.

    For many years, the “voice” of such activism tended to be the Federation of Islamic Student Societies (FOSIS), often setting up an arguably unhelpful and simplistic link between Jewish students, the Union of Jewish Students and a “pro Israel” position on the one hand, and Muslim students, FOSIS and a “pro Palestinian” position on the other.

    For all sorts of obvious reasons, the simplicity of those links and resultant “sides” was always problematic – it has never been just Muslim students and Jewish students caught up in debates over the conflict, and there have always been significant differences of opinion on the conflict within those “sides”.

    But it’s also true to say that both UJS and FOSIS were able to act in an “official” student representative role in a similar way to that that Freeman frames students’ unions as inhabiting – able to speak to power, their own members, and through NUS, each other. In recent years, FOSIS has fallen away in prominence – the channel for much of the anger and activism now represented by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and related offshoots – while UJS has tended to focus its efforts on persuading power to exert authority over antisemitism.

    That is not to suggest that either is wrong, or illegitimate, or especially problematic – but it has meant that in this phase of the Middle East crisis, one “side” has looked very official, while the “other” has looked like the opposite. In a climate where words like “oppressor” get attached to one side and “terrorist” to the other, those types of perhaps accidental perceptions are likely to have clouded wider students’ engagement in and understanding of what has been happening.

    Partnership and power

    Bringing both Serbia and the HEPI paper together, in quieter moments this week I’ve been caused to re-read this terrific paper from Simon Varwell on citizen participation in an era of emergency decision-making.

    Varwell is a former staffer from Sparqs – the little known (outside of Scotland) student participation “agency” originally set up to give a boost to class rep training north of the border. It rarely gets the credit it deserves from Scottish ministers or Principals, but it’s much more than its roots as a train the trainer scheme for reps these days – producing acres of intelligent and helpful material that has helped to engender partnership between students and universities in Scotland more generally.

    His paper – written in the teeth of the Covid crisis – makes a compelling argument that what Sherry Arnstein described in the late 60s as a “ladder” of participation pretty much turned into a circle during the pandemic – where the very highest and lowest levels of student engagement overlapped in a zone of anger and conflict.

    I think that argument matters – not especially from a tactical point of view, but because it’s clear that in some universities, notions of “partnership” melt away quickly when something more “serious” or “risky” is on the table – whether that’s making cuts to provision, handling Covid, or dealing with ministerial and press interest in a protest or “woke” initiative on campus.

    Partnership can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. But fundamentally it’s about sharing power, both between groups of students and between students and their university.

    Few would argue that partnerships of the latter should be “equal”. But when what is sold as a safe environment doesn’t feel like it, and when what is promoted as way of having your voice heard or your interests met feels like being ignored or marginalised, “senior” partners should always be mindful that universities aren’t schools, authority tends to depend on consent, and whatever the weight of expectation on the “grown ups” to crack down and control, conflict almost always requires both mediation and mutual respect.

    Source link

  • Going against the grain? Arts Based Research and the EdD: Resistance, activism and identity

    Going against the grain? Arts Based Research and the EdD: Resistance, activism and identity

    by Tim Clark and Tom Dobson

    There has been growing interest in the potential of arts-based research (ABR) methods to enrich educational inquiry (Everley, 2021). However, minimal attention has been given to how accessible or relevant ABR is for practice-based researchers (including lecturers and teachers), who undertake the professional doctorate in education (EdD) pathway. We believe that this lack of attention is significant, partly because institutional frameworks for doctoral programmes are often informed by traditional models of PhD research, which may constrain the creative possibilities of practice-based study (Vaughan, 2021), and partly due to the nature and ‘uniqueness’ of the EdD as a research degree (Dennis, Chandler & Punthil, 2023).

    We have previously argued that ABR potentially holds particular promise for EdD research due to its alignment with the programme’s highly relational and contextual nature and its engagement with diverse audiences. In our 2024 paper, which was part of a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education, we mapped the theoretical similarities in understandings of ABR and the EdD, exploring this alignment across aspects including practice, audience and reflexivity (Dobson & Clark, 2024). Our paper called for colleagues to ‘embrace hybridity’ and provide permission for creativity in EdD research and we attempted to illustrate this within the paper itself, entangling examples of creative nonfiction writing with a traditional scoping review to embody our theorisation. However, we also concluded with a realisation that maximising the potential of ABR requires careful attention to how design, practice and regulations support students’ identity development and agency (Savva & Nygaard, 2021).

    To build on this, throughout 2024 we have been working with a group of nine EdD students studying at our respective institutions, who are all exploring the potential of ABR for their work. These students span professional roles from early childhood through to higher education, and disciplines including the arts, business and science. Following initial narrative interviews with each student, we developed an online cross-institution action learning set (Revans, 1982) to facilitate dialogue and learning relating to some of the key problems and opportunities students were experiencing in relation to their engagement with ABR. As a group we met 6 times, each time agreeing an area of focus, and providing opportunities for individuals to present and group members to ask clarifying and open-ended coaching style questions. This process culminated in creative analysis, where we collaboratively analysed and reflected on the learning that had taken place, and each student presented a creative interpretation of their learning to the group. We are currently working with a group of these EdD students to co-author a paper which captures and illustrates this learning and shares these creative outputs.

    Alongside this, the second paper from our project (Clark & Dobson, forthcoming) explores some of the key learning arising from the initial interview phase – in particular the idea of ABR as a form of ‘resistance’ involving potentially either a deliberate, or more hesitant, decision to ‘go against the grain’. Using Glăveanu’s 5A’s theory (actors, actions, artifacts, audiences and affordances) to understand creativity as embedded in social relations, we developed the interview transcripts into vignettes for each student and identified three key strands of the students’ perceptions of their experiences – many of which continued to be key areas of focus as we worked through the action learning set process. The process highlighted the students’ understanding of how methodological expectations were reflected through key audiences and structures, how methodological choices aligned with their sense of self and identity and the role of ABR in promoting action and agency. The vignettes offered a nuanced illustration of the tensions in these areas, which we feel offers wider value due to the fact that, unlike any previous work we had identified in this area, the understandings related to students both with and without previous artist identities, backgrounds or experiences.

    The focus on audience and structures highlighted the numerous audiences which exist for students’ EdD research, often spanning academic, professional and community spaces and how these can create tensions in terms of expectations of what research ‘should’ look like. Some students talked of an ongoing battle to justify and ensure their ABR projects were taken seriously, whilst others positioned their decision to use ABR as an active decision to resist academic or managerial structures they perceived had been unhelpfully imposed on them. This also highlighted that whilst valuing creativity in research within the micro context of an EdD programme itself (through teaching and supervision) was significant and built confidence, students also needed support to consider how to frame their work in wider contexts, including through institutional processes (such as those for ethics approval) and professional and academic communities. One student, for example, highlighted feeling ‘junior’ and ‘a bit insecure’ about engaging in wider university processes designed for what they felt was understood as more ‘serious research’.

    In relation to identities and self, we explored a complex and nuanced understanding of students’ perceptions of the need for ongoing negotiation of the entanglement between professional, researcher, and in some cases, artist identities. Where students identified pre-existing artist identities, for some this created an obvious alignment with their research, but for others they identified tensions, including feeling ‘nervous’ about bringing this identity into their research and apprehensive of their relevance to an academic audience. Where students had no prior expertise or experience in the arts, they often expressed hesitance regarding using ABR, but strong feelings about its potential to align with aspects of their professional identity and values. For example, they appreciated ABR’s affordances in ensuring research was accessible to wider communities and supporting children’s voices to be heard.

    This also connected with the final strand, action and agency, where ABR was positioned by the students as having the potential to facilitate an emancipatory process in education, promote agency and in some cases play a role in research as a form of activism. This was often associated with ideas of social justice, with one student, for example, talking of ABR as providing agency for him to ‘push back against’ an education system that marginalises certain groups. Alongside this, another highlighted ABR as having stronger potential to be participatory and action based, maximising the benefits of the research process itself on her participants who were also her students.   

    As we continue our work on this project, the learning it has generated allows us to begin to reflect on its implications: implications that are both within individual EdD programs, where teaching and supervision have strong potential to offer spaces to explore, and reflect on, the potential value of ABR within EdD research, and at an institutional level, where regulations need to continue to respond to growing focus on the social and professional relevance of doctoral research and the range of models, and methodologies, they encompass. A key part of the action learning sets has also been their role in highlighting the value of facilitating methodological dialogue and creating a community of doctoral researchers exploring ABR. As one of the students reflected, this has helped with their sense of ‘validation’ for their work and provided a space to navigate some of the key tensions.

    Dr Timothy Clark is Director of Research and Enterprise for the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research focuses on aspects of doctoral pedagogy and researcher development, particularly in relation to academic writing and methodological decision making on the professional Doctorate in Education (EdD). https://www.linkedin.com/in/drtimothyclark/

    Dr Tom Dobson is Professor of Education at York St John University, where he leads the Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme. His research explores creative writing in education as well as the use of arts-based research by EdD students. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-dobson-84860388/

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

    Source link

  • OfS with their heads: is Cromwell to blame?

    OfS with their heads: is Cromwell to blame?

    by Paul Temple

    If you’ve been watching the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, you may like me have been surprised by how little higher education featured in the story. (All right, they couldn’t cover every aspect of sixteenth-century English life, but still.) England’s two universities at that time (Scotland of course had four by the end of the sixteenth century) had essential roles as the principal providers of the skilled workforces that expanding commercial, administrative, and legal functions needed – although where Thomas Cromwell himself (played by Mark Rylance) gained his legal and administrative skills remains a mystery: presumably they were picked up during his travels as a young man around Europe. As a study covering a slightly earlier period put it, the medieval university professionalized knowledge, with increasingly specialised courses fitting students for careers in secular professions (Leff, 1968). Religious instruction, sometimes assumed to be the main function of the pre-modern university, was largely undertaken in separate monastic and cathedral schools. These might have developed into universities with secular roles, but instead in England largely faded away.

    The significance of England’s two universities is indicated by the powers that Cromwell took to control them in his ascent through English government in the 1530s. At Oxford, he saved the institution that his patron Cardinal Wolsey had established as Cardinal College and turned it into Christ Church College; and in 1534 “wrested the Visitorship of New College [by then 155 years old] from its customary holder as Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner” (MacCulloch, 2018: 275) – Cromwell’s implacable enemy, played creepily in the series by Mark Gatiss. This created another grudge that Gardiner held against Cromwell, and which he would repay with interest. Tensions surrounding what we would now call the governance of higher education had surprisingly important ramifications in the politics of the Tudor court. (Wolsey also established in 1528 a college in Ipswich, his place of birth, but for a number of complicated reasons it was short-lived, and so never, as it presumably might have done, became England’s third university.)

    Medieval and early-modern Oxford University was continually engaged in disputes, sometimes violent ones, with the city, and Cromwell was apparently regularly called in to arbitrate. This was the man at the very centre of the administration of the English state: if the Cabinet Secretary dropped in to help your University sort out a planning problem with the local council, it would indicate, I think, that we were looking at a big deal nationally. (We may gain a sense of the scale of these town vs gown disputes by referring to what are known as the St Scholastica’s Day riots of 1354 which led to the deaths of 62 Oxford scholars. As Oxford student numbers have been estimated at around 1,500 at this time, this implies a remarkable death toll of about 4% of the student population. Not for the last time in troubles involving university students, drink seems to have been implicated.)

    It seems that Cambridge University felt that they were getting a bit left out, and so in 1534 offered Cromwell the position of High Steward and a year later elected him Chancellor, in place of Bishop John Fisher, who was executed that year – although not, it seems, as a result of any failures in university leadership (MacCulloch, 2018: 276); so unfortunately we cannot properly read this as a warning about the risks involved in university management. It seems that Cromwell’s first job at Cambridge was to deal with the town vs gown hostilities centred around the annual fair held on Stourbridge Common: presumably he was by now something of an expert in managing these conflicts. He was also, it seems, interested in what we would now call curriculum reform, despite having no personal experience of university study: as MacCulloch remarks, under Cromwell’s direction, this was the first time “government had intruded on the internal affairs of Oxford and Cambridge, an interference that has never thereafter ceased” (306). Some of the blame for the activities of the Office for Students must therefore be traceable back to Thomas Cromwell: how did Hilary Mantel miss this plot angle?

    References

    Leff, G (1968) Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries New York, NY: Wiley

    MacCulloch, D (2018) Thomas Cromwell: A Life London: Allen Lane

    Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

    Source link

  • Study Reveals Key Factors Driving Student College Choice in 2025

    Study Reveals Key Factors Driving Student College Choice in 2025

    A comprehensive new study by education research firm EAB has identified the most influential factors shaping how students choose colleges, with academic program variety, campus safety, and student organizations emerging as the top three drivers of student attraction.

    The research, analyzing data from U.S. four-year colleges, found that schools offering a wider range of majors see significantly higher student interest, with each additional program contributing to increased application and enrollment rates. Campus safety measures and the number of available student organizations were also found to be major factors in students’ decision-making process.

    “What’s particularly interesting is how these factors play out differently across institution types,” said Dr. Ryan Gardner-Cook, the project director. “For example, smaller schools gain more from incremental improvements in campus amenities and academic offerings compared to larger institutions.”

    The study also revealed that affordability remains a critical factor, especially for first-generation and low-income students. Schools with lower net prices and stronger financial aid packages showed notably higher attraction rates among these demographics.

    Environmental factors like climate and location also play a significant role. Schools in temperate climates and growing urban areas generally showed stronger appeal to prospective students. State-level political environments were found to increasingly influence student choice as well.

    The research identified nine distinct “institutional personas” ranging from “Accessible Education Anchors” to “Rigorous Academic Giants,” each with unique characteristics and challenges in attracting students. This classification system aims to help institutions better understand their competitive position and develop more effective recruitment strategies.

    For institutions looking to improve their student attraction, the study recommends focusing on controllable factors like admissions processes, student life offerings, and academic programs while finding ways to mitigate challenges related to location or cost.

    The findings come at a crucial time as higher education institutions face evolving student preferences and increasing competition for enrollment.

     

    Source link

  • Student Debt by Ethnicity | HESA

    Student Debt by Ethnicity | HESA

    Hi all. Just a quick one today, this time on some data I recently got from StatsCan.

    We know a fair a bit about student debt in Canada, especially with respect to distribution by gender, type of institution, province, etc. (Chapter 6 of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada is just chock full of this kind of data if you’re minded to take a deeper dive). But to my knowledge no one has ever pulled and published the data on debt by ethnicity, even though this data has been collected for quite some time through the National Graduates Survey (NGS). So I ordered the data, and here’s what I discovered.

    Figure 1 shows incidence of borrowing for the graduating class of 2020, combined for all graduates of universities and graduates, for the eight largest ethnicities covered by the NGS (and before anyone asks, “indigeneity” is not considered an ethnicity so anyone indicating an indigenous ethnicity is unfortunately excluded from this data… there’s more below on the challenges of getting additional data). And the picture it shows is…a bit complex.

    Figure 1: Incidence of Borrowing, College and University Graduates Combined, Class of 2020

    If you just look at the data on government loan programs (the orange bars), we see that only Arab students have borrowing rates in excess of 1 in 2. But for certain ethnicities, the borrowing rate is much lower. For Latin American and Chinese students, the borrowing rate is below 1 in 3, and among South Asian students the borrowing rate is barely 1 in 5. Evidence of big differences in attitudes towards borrowing!

    Except…well when you add in borrowing from private sources (e.g. from banks and family) so as to take a look at overall rates of borrowing incidence, the differences in borrowing rates are a lot narrower. Briefly, Asian and Latin American students borrow a lot more money from private sources (mainly family) than do Arab students, whites, and Blacks. These probably come with slightly easier repayment terms, but it’s hard to know for sure. An area almost certainly worthy of further research.

    There is a similarly nuanced picture when we look at median levels of indebtedness among graduates who had debt. This is shown below in Figure 2.

    Figure 2: Median Borrowing, College and University Graduates Combined, Class of 2020

    Now, there isn’t a huge amount of difference in exiting debt levels by ethnicity: the gap is only about $6,000 between the lowest total debt levels (Filipinos) and the highest (Chinese). But part of the problem here is that we can’t distinguish the reason for the various debt levels. Based on what we know about ethnic patterns of postsecondary education, we can probably guess that Filipino students have low debt levels not because they are especially wealthy and can afford to go to post-secondary without financial assistance. But rather because they are more likely to go to college and this spend less time, on average, in school paying fees and accumulating debt. Similarly, Chinese students don’t have the highest debt because they have low incomes; they have higher debt because they are the ethnic group the most likely to attend university and spend more time paying (higher) fees.

    (Could we get the data separately for universities and colleges to clear up the confound? Yes, we could. But it cost me $3K just to get this data. Drilling down a level adds costs, as would getting data based on indigenous identity, and this is a free email, and so for the moment what we have above will have to do. If anyone wants to pitch in a couple of grand to do more drilling-down, let me know and I would be happy to coordinate some data liberation).

    It is also possible to use NGS data to look at post-graduate income by debt. I obtained the data by in fairly large ranges (e.g. $0-20K, $20-60K, etc.), but it’s possible on the basis of that to estimate roughly what median incomes are (put it this way: the exact numbers are not exactly right, but the ordinal rank of income of the various ethnicities are probably accurate). My estimations of median 2023 income of 2020 graduates—which includes those graduates who are not in the labour market full-time, if you’re wondering why the numbers look a little low—are shown below in Figure 3.

    Figure 3: Estimate Median 2023 Income, College and University Graduates Combined, Class of 2020

    Are there differences in income here? Yes, but they aren’t huge. Most ethnic groups have median post-graduate incomes between $44 and $46,000. The two lowest-earning groups (Latin Americans and Filipinos) re both disproportionately enrolled in community colleges, which is part of what is going on in this data (if you want disaggregated data, see above).

    Now, the data from the previous graphs can be combined to look at debt-to-income ratios, both for students with debt, and all students (that is, including those that do not borrow). This is shown below in Figure 4.

    Figure 4: Estimated Median 2023 Debt-to-Income Ratios, College and University Graduates Combined, Class of 2020

    If you’re just dividing indebtedness by income (the blue bars), you get a picture that looks a lot like Figure 2 in debt, because differences in income are pretty small. But if you are looking at debt-to-income ratios across all students (including those that do not borrow) you get a very different picture because as we saw in Figure 1, there are some pretty significant differences in overall borrowing rates. So, for instance, Chinese students go from having the worst debt-to-income ratio on one measure to being middle of the pack on another because they have relatively low incidence of borrowing; similarly, students of Latin American origin go from being middle-of-the-pack to nearly the lowest debt-to-income ratios because they are a lot less likely to borrow than others. Black students end up having among the highest debt-to-income ratios not because they earn significantly less than other graduates, but because both the incidence and amount of their borrowing is relatively high.

    But I think the story to go with here is that while there are differences between ethnic groups in terms of borrowing, debt, and repayment ratios, and that it’s worth trying to do something to narrow them, the difference in these rates is not enormous. Overall, it appears that as a country we are achieving reasonably good things here, with the caveat that if this data were disaggregated by university/ college, the story might not be quite as promising.

    And so ends the first-ever analysis of student debt and repayment by ethnic background. Hope you found it moderately enlightening.

    Source link

  • How Spokane Public Schools is helping kids engage in real life

    How Spokane Public Schools is helping kids engage in real life

    Key points:

    Social media has connected kids like never before, but what they get in likes and shares, they lose in real, meaningful engagement with their peers and classmates. Lunch hours are spent hunched over smartphones, and after-school time means less sports and more Snapchat.

    The adverse effects of this excessive screen time have significantly impacted students’ social- emotional health. Forty-one percent of teens with the highest social media usage struggle with mental health issues, and between 2010 and 2020, anxiety among adolescents skyrocketed by 106 percent.

    At Spokane Public Schools (SPS), educators and administrators are reversing the side effects of social media by re-connecting with students through school-based extracurricular activities. Through its transformative Engage IRL (Engage in Real Life) initiative, the district is encouraging kids to get off their devices and onto the pickleball court, into the swimming pool, and outside in the fresh air. With more than 300 clubs and sports to choose from, SPS students are happier, healthier, and less likely to reach for their smartphones.

    An innovative approach to student engagement

    Even before the pandemic, SPS saw levels of engagement plummet among the student population, especially in school attendance rates, due in part to an increase in mental health issues caused by social media. Rebuilding classroom connections in the era of phone-based childhoods would require district leaders to think big.

    “The question was not ‘How do we get kids off their phones?’ but ‘How do we get them engaged with each other more often?’” said Ryan Lancaster, executive director of communications for SPS. “Our intent was to get every kid, every day, involved in something positive outside the school day and extend that community learning past the classroom.” 

    To meet the district’s goal of creating a caring and connected community, in 2022, school leaders formed a workgroup of parents, community members, coaches, and teachers to take inventory of current extracurriculars at all district schools and identify gaps in meeting students’ diverse interests and hobbies.

    Engaging with students was a top priority for workgroup members. “The students were excited to be heard,” explained Nikki Otero Lockwood, SPS board president. “A lot of them wanted an art club. They wanted to play board games and learn to knit. No matter their interests, what they really wanted was to be at school and be connected to others.”

    Working with community partners and LaunchNW, an Innovia Foundation initiative focused on helping every child feel a sense of belonging, SPS launched Engage IRL–an ambitious push to turn students’ ideas for fun and fulfillment into real-life, engaging activities.

    Over the past two years, Engage IRL has been the catalyst for increasing access and opportunities for K-12 students to participate in clubs, sports, arts activities, and other community events. From the Math is Cool Club and creative writing classes to wrestling and advanced martial arts, kids can find a full range of activities to join through the Elite IRL website. In addition, five engagement navigators in the district help connect families and students to engagement opportunities through individual IRL Plans and work with local organizations to expand programming.

    “All day, every day, our navigators are working to break down barriers and tackle challenges to make sure nothing gets in the way of what kids want to be involved in and engaged in,” said Stephanie Splater, executive director of athletics and activities for SPS. “For example, when we didn’t have a coach for one of the schools in our middle school football program, our navigators mobilized for really good candidates in a short amount of time just from their personal outreach.”

    In only two years, student engagement in extracurriculars has nearly doubled. Furthermore, according to Lancaster, since the Engage IRL launch, SPS hasn’t experienced a day where it dipped below 90 percent attendance. 

    “That’s an outlier in the past few years for us, for sure, and we think it’s because kids want to be at school. They want to be engaged and be part of all the cool things we’re doing. We’ve had a really great start to the 2024-2025 school year, and Engage IRL has played a huge role.”

    Engage IRL also helped SPS weather student blowback when the district launched a new cell phone policy this year. The policy prohibits cell phone use in elementary and middle school and limits it to lunch and periods between classes for high school students. Because students were already building personal connections with classmates and teachers through Engage IRL, many easily handled social media withdrawal.

    Creating opportunities for all kids

    Key to Engage IRL’s success was ensuring partnerships and programs were centered in equity, allowing every child to participate regardless of ability, financial or transportation constraints, or language barriers.

    Establishing a no-cut policy in athletics by creating additional JV and C teams ensured kids with a passion for sports, but not college-level skills, continued to compete on the court or field. Partnering with Special Olympics also helped SPS build new unified sports programs that gave children with disabilities a chance to play. And engagement navigators are assisting English language learners and their families in finding activities that help them connect with kids in their new country.

    For Otero Lockwood, getting her daughter with autism connected to clubs after years of struggling to find school activities has been life-changing.

    “There are barriers to finding community for some kids,” she shared. “We know kids with disabilities are more likely to be underemployed as adults and not as connected to the community. This is something we have the power to do that will have a lasting impact on the children we serve.”

    Through Engage IRL, SPS has redefined student engagement by expanding access and opportunity to 6,000 students across 58 schools. In just two short years, the district has seen attendance increase, student wellness improve, and dependence on smartphones diminish. By continuing to listen to the needs of students and rallying the community to partner on out-of-school activities, Spokane Public Schools is successfully fostering the face-to-face connections every child needs to thrive.

    Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

    Source link

  • Crafting technology-driven IEPs

    Crafting technology-driven IEPs

    Key points:

    Individualized Education Plans (IEP) have been the foundation of special education for decades, and the process in which these documents are written has evolved over the years.

    As technology has evolved, writing documents has also evolved. Before programs existed to streamline the IEP writing process, creating IEPs was once a daunting task of paper and pencil. Not only has the process of writing the IEP evolved, but IEPs are becoming technology-driven.

    Enhancing IEP goal progress with data-driven insights using technology: There are a variety of learning platforms that can monitor a student’s performance in real-time, tailoring to their individual needs and intervening areas for improvement. Data from these programs can be used to create students’ annual IEP goals. This study mentions that the ReadWorks program, used for progress monitoring IEP goals, has 1.2 million teachers and 17 million students using its resources, which provide content, curricular support, and digital tools. ReadWorks is free and provides all its resources free of charge and has both printed and digital versions of the material available to teachers and students (Education Technology Nonprofit, 2021).

    Student engagement and involvement with technology-driven IEPs: Technology-driven IEPs can also empower students to take an active role in their education plan. According to this study, research shows that special education students benefit from educational technology, especially in concept teaching and in practice-feedback type instructional activities (Carter & Center, 2005; Hall, Hughes & Filbert, 2000; Hasselbring & Glaser, 2000). It is vital for students to take ownership in their learning. When students on an IEP reach a certain age, it is important for them to be the active lead in their plan. Digital tools that are used for technology-driven IEPs can provide students with visual representations of their progress, such as dashboards or graphs. When students are given a visual representation of their progress, their engagement and motivation increases.

    Technology-driven IEPs make learning fun: This study discusses technology-enhanced and game based learning for children with special needs. Gamified programs, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) change the learning experience from traditional to transformative. Gamified programs are intended to motivate students with rewards, personalized feedback, and competition with leaderboards and challenges to make learning feel like play. Virtual reality gives students an immersive experience that they would otherwise only be able to experience outside of the classroom. It allows for deep engagement and experiential learning via virtual field trips and simulations, without the risk of visiting dangerous places or costly field trip fees that not all districts or students can afford. Augmented reality allows students to visualize abstract concepts such as anatomy or 3D shapes in context. All these technologies align with technology-driven IEPs by providing personalized, accessible, and measurable learning experiences that address diverse needs. These technologies can adapt to a student’s individual skill level, pace, and goals, supporting their IEP.

    Challenges with technology-driven IEPs: Although there are many benefits to
    technology-driven IEPs, it is important to address the potential challenges to ensure equity across school districts. Access to technology in underfunded school districts can be challenging without proper investment in infrastructures, devices, and network connection. Student privacy and data must also be properly addressed. With the use of technologies for technology-driven IEPs, school districts must take into consideration laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

    The integration of technology into the IEP process to create technology-driven IEPs represents a shift from a traditional process to a transformative process. Technology-driven IEPs create more student-centered learning experiences by implementing digital tools, enhancing collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. These learning experiences will enhance student engagement and motivation and allow students to take control of their own learning, making them leaders in their IEP process. However, as technology continues to evolve, it is important to address the equity gap that may arise in underfunded school districts.

    Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

    Source link

  • Students are at the centre of a political uprising in Serbia. Again

    Students are at the centre of a political uprising in Serbia. Again

    Today, after three long months of protests, demonstrators in Serbia have called a general strike – and the government has threatened to retaliate.

    Activists are challenging the authority of a populist, nationalist government following months of demonstrations that have brought, at times, over 100,000 people onto the streets.

    But for me what’s significant about the growing movement – that some think could yet topple the government – is that it has been almost entirely led by students:

    The students in the blockade call on the citizens of Serbia for a total suspension of all activities on Friday, January 24… We don’t go to work, we don’t go to lectures, we don’t do our daily duties. Let’s take freedom into our own hands!

    It is a story partly about authoritarianism and tactics, and about how power reacts to protest. But it’s also a story about student movements – both official and decentralised – and how they can both lead, and be co-opted, by others.

    Back in November, a concrete roof at the railway station in Serbia’s second largest city Novi Sad collapsed, killing 15 people.

    The city is home to the University of Novi Sad – with over 50,000 students and 5,000 staff – and in the wake of the tragedy, a student activist group began to organise protests both in Novi Sad and the capital Belgrade – leaving red handprints at the entrances of government buildings to demand the arrest of officials. Government corruption was their claim.

    The group leading much of the activism has been Students Against Authoritarian Rule (STAV) – formed last January from within the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad, and responsible last summer for a two-week blockade of the Rectorate building over what they saw as undemocratic practices in student representation.

    It’s a fix

    STAV’s dissatisfaction had its origins in a law passed in Serbia back in 2021, when the National Assembly passed a new Law on Student Organizing as part of a broader set of educational reforms designed to enhance student participation and accountability.

    When a small group of us visited the country last year, it all looked pretty positive – it formalises the roles of student parliaments at both faculty and university level, grants them participation in university decision making over issues like teaching, curricula, and regulations, gives them a formal role in advocating for academic and social rights, sets them up to promote extracurricular activities, and establishes them as drivers of national and international collaboration.

    It also sets out detailed rules on elections – eligibility criteria, timelines, and protocols to ensure a fair electoral process. But that’s partly where the trouble started.

    Last October the Center for Science and Innovation for Development (SCiDEV) – a Tirana-based think tank that works to contribute to democratisation in Albania, the Western Balkans and the European Union – published a comparative analysis of of student perceptions and engagement in student governments in Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia.

    It compiled growing concern about the involvement of political parties in the student electoral process in Serbia, a perception of a lack of transparency in election procedures, a belief amongst some students that the electoral process is manipulated or unfair, and a lack of independent mechanisms to monitor election processes and prevent misconduct.

    That’s partly because of perceptions that both locally and nationally within SKONUS (Serbia’s NUS), the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) appears to have played a key role. Milan Savić, who was elected as SKONUS President in 2016 and 2018, was elected to the National Assembly of Serbia as a member of SNS – and activists argue that since then, its leadership has repeatedly aligned itself with government policies rather than defending the student interest.

    Current President Margareta Smiljanić has also been linked to the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) through her involvement with something called the Centre for Education and Youth Development in Belgrade (CEROB) – whose headquarters, critics claim, were used to distribute payments for work in the SNS call centre.

    If that sounds fairly tenuous, it’s because it is. It may be that Smiljanić and her predecessors have links to the government – but she’s also one of a long line of “official” student representatives in pretty much every country that get accused of “siding” with university managements or government when engaging in meetings discussing issues like timetabling and food subsidies (two key planks of her manifesto) rather than trying to analyse a broader system and reject a wider administration.

    Either way, if the SCiDEV report provided a backdrop of evidence, the Novi Sad tragedy provided an event to rally over for STAV – the collapsed canopy a symbol of the corruption they saw as endemic in the Serbian political system.

    Wastewater and tear gas

    A week after the tragedy, protests in the two cities had started to grow – flares, red paint and wastewater were thrown onto the City Hall building in Novi Sad, and police responded with tear gas – while a smaller group of angrier protesters wearing masks attempted to enter the building and hand over their demands that those responsible for the canopy collapse face justice.

    That night, President Aleksandar Vučić came out to address the public – saying the police were “showing restraint” while issuing a warning that “horrific, violent” protests were underway:

    People of Serbia please do not think violence is allowed… All those taking part in the incidents will be punished.

    Miran Pogačar, a former philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy and a prominent activist involved in citizens’ movement “Bravo”, was featured across national news:

    One glass window can be mended but we cannot bring back 14 lives. People are angry. Serbia won’t stand for this.

    At this stage it looked like the government was going to be able to keep the public on its side – highlighting a violent “former/non student” core as somehow manipulating more mainstream student protesters has long been a tactic of governments facing student unrest – a key feature, for example, of the Millbank student protests over tuition fees in London in 2010.

    But days later, the mood changed. CCTV footage of the collapse started to go viral – showing the huge canopy on the outer wall of Novi Sad station building collapsing onto young people below on benches. The government, having attempted initially to draw a line under events by promising a full investigation, was on the back foot.

    And the student activists of STAV – partly conscious of the role that peaceful student activism played across Central and Eastern Europe in bringing down communism – managed to get its more violent elements under control to secure public sympathy, while the banners painted by students started to become more direct – the most common being red paint on cardboard saying “corruption kills”.

    Students leading change

    There are good reasons for students to, for want of a better phrase, feel the hand of history on their shoulders.

    In the 1960s, Belgrade’s new “Student City” had become a central hub for student solidarity and the sharing of experiences and opinions, associations and clubs between students from both across the country and the world. In June 1968, protesting an accommodation shortage, the lack of voice in university structures and President Tito’s reforms (that had led to high unemployment and forced graduates to leave the country and find work elsewhere), students gathered at Block 1 of Studentski Grad to stage the first mass protest in Yugoslavia after World War II.

    Police beat the students and banned all public gatherings, but students then went into a seven-day strike – staging debates and speeches on social justice, and handing out copies of their banned magazines. Tito’s only option was to give in to some of the students’ demands – famously saying that “students are right” during a televised speech. But in the following years, he dealt with the leaders of the protests by sacking them from university and Communist party posts.

    Students were also central to the protests against Slobodan Milošević and the broader Yugoslav Communist Party in the late 1980s – ones that began as educational and economic grievances became infused with demands for political liberalisation, academic freedom and democracy. The economic crisis in Yugoslavia had fueled discontent, and it was students at the University of Belgrade that had started to form dissident groups to oppose censorship, restrictions on academic freedoms, and worsening living conditions.

    Inspired by other anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe, Serbian students began organizing campus forums in 1988, demanding democratic reforms – and by March 1989, the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy by Milošević’s regime became a turning point, sparking protests against authoritarianism and the use of force. By May, students shifted focus to broader democratic demands, including free elections and minority rights, with their activism peaking during events like the famous Gazimestan rally and widespread “general strikes” across cities.

    Nevertheless, it took another decade for the regime to fall.

    The Student Union of Serbia (SUS) got going in 1992 at the Belgrade Faculty of Law, aiming to promote transparency, democratic elections, and enthusiasm within student organisations. Throughout the 1990s, SUS played a key role in student protests against the autocratic regime, notably during the 1996/97 demonstrations advocating for the recognition of local election results and university autonomy.

    Back home, Living Marxism – the in-house magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party that went on to morph into libertarian website/group Spiked! (famous now for its Free Speech rankings of universities and its War on Woke) – argued that Western media outlets and international organisations exaggerated Serbian atrocities while downplaying crimes committed by others such as Bosnian Muslims or Croats.

    In 1997, it had published an article claiming that ITN’s footage of emaciated Bosnian Muslim detainees at the Trnopolje camp was misleading – alleging that the camp was not a concentration camp but rather a refugee centre, and that the imagery was manipulated to evoke Holocaust comparisons. It provoked outrage from human rights groups and journalists – and today Spiked! remains resolutely anti-EU  and oddly pro-populism.

    Back in Serbia, student-led Otpor! continued its tactics of nonviolent resistance, creative protests, and grassroots organising to help unify opposition groups, inspire mass demonstrations, and sustain momentum for democratic reforms. By the turn of the millennium, things were coming to a head – Milošević refused to concede defeat in the September 2000 presidential elections, and protests erupted again on October 5, as hundreds of thousands of Serbians from across the country marched to Belgrade demanding his resignation.

    Then, as now, students were accused of being puppets of the West – not least because the slogan Gotov je! had been distributed via 2.5 million stickers and 5,000 spray cans channeled by the U.S. Department of State.

    Student protesters stormed government buildings, including the Federal Parliament, and symbolically burned election ballots believed to be fraudulent. Faced with overwhelming public opposition and a breakdown of loyalty within the police and military, Milošević resigned on October 7, 2000, marking the end of his regime and paving the way for democratic reforms in Serbia.

    Few believe that communism could have fallen in the way it did either in Serbia or across Europe more generally in that period without students – every country in the region has its own set of stories about how students inspired wider movements. The question now, in Georgia, maybe soon in Romania and more generally across the region, is whether students will play a key role again in bringing down populists often accused of being in bed with Russia.

    Legitimate representatives

    By December 5th 2024, unrest was building in Belgrade. A group of students at a protest symbolically turned their backs on the Minister of Construction, Goran Vesić during a public appearance in the capital. Hours later he’d resigned, but they’d secured the support of the Bar Association of Serbia, which announced a one-day strike citing “systematic and long-term interference by the executive branch in the work of the judiciary”, and problems with the separation of powers in a democratic society.

    Dejan Bagarić, a PhD student from the Faculty of Philosophy and one of the perceived ringleaders of STAV, was jailed for up to 30 days on charges of “reckless theft” and “assault on an official” after taking and returning a phone from a journalist filming a protest incident involving his girlfriend. And Branko Rodić, another student from Novi Sad, was reportedly assaulted by two people believed to be members of the National Assembly’s security, who knocked him to the ground and hit him in the face.

    Six days later, students gathered in front of the headquarters of RTS, Serbia’s public television station – protesting over coverage of President Aleksandar Vučić’s claims that the demonstrators were “funded by Western countries seeking to destabilize Serbia”.

    The crisis growing, Vučić then pulled an age-old tactic beloved by governments and university managements over the years – he ostentatiously held a meeting with the SKONUS President Margareta Smiljanić and other “representatives of the legitimately elected students” at which he announced a housing scheme offering young people to purchase €75,000 flats with a deposit of €1000.

    SKONUS had been formed in the slipstream of the fall of Milošević in 2005 – established to inject some resource into student representation and “officially” represent students at accredited universities in Serbia, with its origins tied to the country’s new Law on Higher Education. Initially, it played a key role in higher education reforms like Bologna and promoting student mobility, and in 2014 worked alongside SUS when the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came to power and cut the number of exam periods from six to five and cut the funding for students’ fifth year of studies.

    But since then, student activist groups have grown suspicious of SKONUS and its leadership’s role in “negotiating” with government and avoiding “non-student” issues. Hence when Margareta Smiljanić responded to Vučić’s deal in December, she both welcomed the announcement, and played up her concern for students’ education:

    The reason we organized this meeting is because we were elected not to hold political positions, but to hold student positions, to answer the students who ask us questions every day about what will happen to the further teaching process and who will ensure the quality of education for the year 2024/2025. We requested from the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the Ministry of Education that we be admitted to the meeting and I would like to thank them for accepting us in record time today.

    She went on to say that no-one had given her an answer on reimbursement of tuition fees, compensation and exam registration, and whether university buildings would re-open at all in the new year:

    These are all questions that are troubling students, and I believe parents as well. We believe that it is of crucial interest for deans, rectors, and the academic community to answer because 230,000 academics are tormented by these questions. We demand urgent answers.

    Whether you believe that Smiljanić was a government stooge that was part of a propaganda effort to brand the activists as extreme and anti-education, or a student leader doing her best to focus on student issues, is fairly moot – either way, Vucic took to the airwaves to build on the divide and rule tactic:

    So, all the [protest] demands have been fulfilled, and we expect those who made the demands to say their demands have been fulfilled and to return to classes. But [if not] it will [then] be clear to the entire public in Serbia … and to all the citizens of Serbia that there were never any demands, but that it was [pure] politics.”

    STAV was having none of that – branding Smiljanić a sell-out and claiming that some of its activists had started to be called in for one-to-one meetings with university managers about their academic “progress”, who had themselves been threatened with the sack if they failed to get students back into classrooms.

    6-7 seconds

    Things continued to escalate. On December 10 a man drove his car into a group of participants, injuring four musicians who’d joined the protests from the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra.

    By December 13, farmers in central Serbia had joined the protests by blocking a motorway with tractors, expressing solidarity with the students and amplifying calls for governmental accountability – and two days later visibly frustrated Prime Minister Miloš Vučević responded to question with “you can’t bring down a country because of 15 people who died, nor 155, nor 1,555”, and was forced to apologise.

    By December 22, the crowd of protesters had swelled again – with over 100,000 gathering in Slavija Square in Belgrade where students had been joined by numerous civil society groups. On Christmas Eve Vučić then also mis-stepped in an interview – claiming that if he wanted to, he could deploy special forces to disperse student protesters “in 6-7 seconds”.

    Demonstrators delivered 1,000 letters to the office of Public Prosecutor Zagorka Dolovac, urging her to fulfill her duties and address the protesters’ demands – and stories were swirling that agents from the Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) had made visits to the workplaces and homes of some of the student organisers’ family members.

    And by now, protests had spread to other Serbian student cities too. In Užice, over 2,000 gathered in front of the city hall to express their support for the movement – and authorities attempts’ to kill that off by turning off street lights were met with portable generators.

    Vučić then publicly accused eight Croatian students – led by twin brothers Lazar and Luka Stojakovic from the Faculty of Organisational Science at Belgrade University – identified by pro-government daily newspaper Vecernje Novosti as protest leaders paid by Croatia’s secret service. Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković dismissed Vučić’s claims as “laughable.” But Lazar and Luka were emboldened:

    Corruption entered every single layer of our society and it is the main cause of roof collapse and killing of 15 people.

    On New Year’s Eve into New Year’s Day 2025, tens of thousands were on the streets, chanting “There is no new year – you still owe us for the old one” – and two weeks later Margareta Smiljanić popped up again on TV, arguing that the the “destruction of the higher education system” was underway, that the protest participants were “not student representatives”, and calling on universities to launch surveys to get a “clear picture” of what the majority of students want:

    We have generations of students who enrolled in studies during the coronavirus. That generation lost two years of normal classes. During the coronavirus, they had make-up and online classes, and now they have classes interrupted again. So we have generations who will graduate with a much lower quality of knowledge… I think that the radicalization of any protests is not good and that through dialogue we can achieve greater goals.

    But Biljana Đorđević – co-president of the Green-Left Front, and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade, responded with another allegation often thrown at student representatives – that she’s been studying for a full decade and has been a student official for eight years:

    She was hired… as the President of a student organization that the regime of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić hires to impersonate students when necessary.

    Since then numbers have grown again – last Friday, during another massive protest in front of the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) building in Belgrade, tens of thousands of students and academics observed a 15-minute silence to honour the victims of the Novi Sad tragedy, and protesters chanted slogans advocating for a general strike.

    This regime stands no chance

    You can pretty much flip a coin at this point on whether the movement will grow and bring down the government, or whether concerns of students about what is starting to look like a write-off of the academic year altogether will somehow see Vučić and his government survive.

    And as was the case in 1989 throughout the former Yugoslavia, it pretty much rests on whether the wider public’s sympathy with “the students” grows or wanes. There are reports of people donating food, businesses providing supplies, taxi drivers offering free fares, and farmers pledging to protect protesters with tractors – but some sense too that parts of the public are tiring of the disruption as it spreads. Who they blame will matter.

    Ljubica Oparnica, a professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Novi Sad, thinks that STAV and “unofficial” student movement will win out:

    I am truly fascinated by the way students are working together. Their solidarity is a fortress that cannot be breached. If we all share the same vision — and here it is clear that we all want a new system, a new and different era — this regime stands no chance.

    And while the country’s four biggest teaching unions struck a deal with the Serbian government on pay increases earlier this month, plenty of schools and teachers have refused to start the new term – with Vucevic now threatening to send in inspectors and sack teachers in schools that take part and go on strike today.

    “I am not threatening anyone,” said Vucevic to RTS this week. “I am merely urging everyone not to play with children and the education system”. Dusan Kokot of the Independent Union of Education Workers of Serbia said that education can’t thrive in a society “plagued by systemic corruption”:

    Education cannot flourish while decision-makers are plagiarists, forgers, usurpers and manipulators.

    In one final – and some say desperate move – Vucevic this week offered a non-binding “advisory referendum” on the government, while opposition leaders demanded a transitional government to ensure fair elections.

    Much now rests on the success or otherwise of today’s general strike. Some still think that a mixture of propaganda, counter-protests and public concern about the grinding to a halt of education in general will see the protests peter out – but Ljubica Oparnica is less sure:

    They won’t give up easily because they enjoy immense privileges. That’s why change seems impossible. But I believe this government will collapse suddenly, like the fallen canopy [at Novi Sad train station]. We’ll all be surprised. I think they’ve reached the end of their strength.



    Source link

  • Ventriloquising the student interest | Wonkhe

    Ventriloquising the student interest | Wonkhe

    Following the devastating review offered by the 2023 report of the Industry and Regulators Committee of the House of Lords, the Office for Students’ (OfS) proposed strategy makes a great play of being centred around “the student interest”.

    But while it recognises that students have diverse and changeable views about their interests, it is still significant that it characterises these as “the student interest” rather than “students’ interests”.

    The reason for doing this is that it makes it much more rhetorically powerful to claim you are doing something in relation to an interest that is definitive, rather than interests which are multivarious and shifting.

    And be clear, the OfS proposed strategy shows a huge appetite to intervene in higher education in the name of “the student interest”.

    Much talk, no sources

    In the draft, OfS boasts that it has done a great deal of work to renew its understanding of the student interest – polling students, holding focus groups, hosting engagement sessions and talking to their own student panel.

    But two things are particularly noticeable about this work. First, whilst a lot of other sources are referenced in their strategy consultation, this is one area where no evidence is provided.

    This means the OfS interpretation of the outcomes of this consultation cannot be interrogated in any way. Clearly OfS knows best how to interpret this interest and isn’t interested in collective conversations to explore its ambiguities and complexities.

    Second, none of this work involves open ended engagement with students and their representative organisations (who appear to have been excluded completely, or at least their involvement is not detailed). They are all forms of consultation in which OfS would have framed the terms and agenda of the discussions (non-decision-making power, as Steven Lukes would have it). It’s consultation – but within tightly defined limits of what can legitimately be said.

    This seems to explain the remarkable number of priorities in the strategy (freedom of speech, mental health, sexual harassment) that are said to be in the student interest but previously appeared in ministerial letters outlining the strategic priorities of the OfS.

    Get a job

    Perhaps most concerning is that the government/treasury logic that the only real reason for going to university is to get a well-paid job is now central to the student interest. Sometimes this is done more subtly by positioning it in the (never-)popular student language of “a return on investment”:

    …in return for their investment of time, money and hard work they [students] expect that education to continue to provide value into the longer-term, including in ways that they may not be able to anticipate while they study (p.12).

    At other times, we are left in no doubt that the primary function of higher education is to serve the economy:

    Our proposals…will support a higher education system equipped to cultivate the skills the country needs and increase employer confidence in the value of English higher education qualifications. High quality higher education will be accessible to more people, and students from all backgrounds will be better able to engage with and benefit from high quality higher education, supporting a more equal society which makes better use of untapped talent and latent potential. The supply of skilled graduates will support local and national economies alike, while the ‘public goods’ associated with high quality higher education will accrue to a wide range of individuals and communities. Public goods include economic growth, a more equal society and greater knowledge understanding (OfS 2024 p.30-31).

    So what we are left with is a proposed strategy that makes powerful claims to be grounded in the student interest – but which could have easily formed part of the last government’s response to the Augar review.

    Whose priorities?

    Through its consultation on its proposed strategy, OfS has presented the priorities of the previous government as if they are drawn straight from its engagement with students.

    We don’t yet know the higher education priorities of the current government, but given the proposed strategy was published under their watch it looks like we are moving in a depressingly familiar direction.

    It is worth reflecting on the profound injustice of this. Students are expected to pay back the cost of their higher education and now have the previous government’s priorities presented as their interest so that OfS can intervene in higher education.

    Yes, you have to pay – but the government and its friendly neighbourhood regulator are here to tell you why you want to pay! It seems that despite the excoriating criticism of the House of Lords Committee, OfS have not really learned how to engage with students or to reflect and reconcile their interests.

    Source link