In his recent HEPI blog, Leo Hanna outlined the dangers of students’ expectations not matching up to reality: wasted opportunities for non-continuing students, lost revenue and reputational harm to institutions. Jo Richards at UCAS, also on HEPI, points out that with the cost of living crisis impacting students disproportionately, this year many students are “thinking ahead to a student experience that might be very different to the one they had originally expected: over half had lowered their expectations about student life.”
But student expectations and the attendant realities are not just impacted by financial concerns. Those early days of University in particular, are ripe with expectation and myth: the promise of transformation, of reinvention, of chances to break free from the past and begin afresh. It’s a time to shed a skin and become a new, better, more successful version of yourself.
There are the academic myths: you will only study things that are interesting instead of stuff you do not care about; it will get you to the career you always wanted; the first year does not count; it’s easier that A-Levels.
