Live & Learn
The stereotypes surrounding students would have us believe that going to university is just one long holiday amongst the dreaming spires of academia. But in these days of tuition fees, student loans and stiff competition when you finally do enter the job market, for most students the old stereotypes have little basis in reality.
“Don’t get me wrong,” says Laura, a student at Nottingham University, “I’m having the time of my life. But it’s hard work too. My parents have invested a lot in my education and I’m up to my eyeballs in debt, so I have to make sure I get the kind of results I need to set me on the right track towards a good career. That means not only working hard at my studies, but making sure my CV shows other interests too, and looking the part when I go for interviews.”
If student life is more of a full-time job than a three-year vacation these days, are we doing enough to help students make the most of their student experience and learn the life skills that they will eventually need in the workplace? Banks, for example, fully aware that today’s students are tomorrow’s high earners, are tripping over each other to attract student customers. But do the incentives of introductory freebies and preferential overdraft rates really constitute good service or should banks be offering students more help with managing their finances and controlling their debt?
And what about on the high street? The days when students proudly wore charity shop cast offs and old army surplus are now long gone. Students expect to look good and have all the same must have electronic goods as their working peers, but without any proof of income, can they access the same deals or get the same credit agreements?
“Sometimes,” says Dan, a student at Manchester Metropolitan University, “I think students are over catered for. We’re really not that different from anyone else our age and I want to be able to choose what’s best for me, rather than have to go for the ‘student deal’ all the time, just because that’s what some guy in a suit somewhere thinks would appeal to me.”
Ten or twenty years on from their student days, most people still look back on that time as some of the best days of their life. But will today’s student generation remember their student days as a time when they were offered the best of everything or as a time where they weren’t permitted to choose for themselves? You tell us……
