Right now, students in higher education are facing many interrelated challenges shared by many beyond the university.
These include the cost-of-living squeeze, increasing debt obligations, a mental health epidemic, the ongoing effects and after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and decades of austerity, increasingly regular economic crises, dramatically increasing wealth disparities, limited job market opportunities, as well as general employment precarity, not to mention the huge rise in anxiety in the face of an undisputed climate emergency.
Transformative action
The prospect of leaving university can feel rather ominous as a result and many students – and the academic staff who teach them – are no longer as reluctant to express frustration and anger about how these challenges have been allowed to emerge so starkly. Yet, both students and academics alike feel disempowered and unsure about how best to turn frustration and anger into transformative action.
