An online parliamentary petition calling for the government to reimburse this year’s tuition fees to university students, has gained 319,343 signatures.
After the lecturers’ strikes in February shortly followed by Covid-19 closures, it feels like we have hardly seen a classroom or received the level of teaching we signed up for last autumn. With lectures being replaced by Powerpoints and Microsoft Teams meetings in the attempt to maintain momentum, many students feel that the current academic year is not worth their £9,250 investment.
Sophie Quinn, 21, a geography undergraduate at the University of Liverpool, started the petition. Commenting in The Guardian this week she said: “I feel being a final year student it’s affected me the most. Obviously there was lots of industrial action, which disrupted our studies. Now with this coronavirus, I just feel like everyone has been completely disrupted.
“It’s not any university’s fault, but we’ve missed out on quite a lot of things. We don’t have a graduation date to look forward to any more. A lot of people are demotivated to do the work. The tuition fees pay for libraries and upkeep of buildings. We are not allowed to use any of that. We are not getting what we paid for.”
More than three hundred thousand students feel much the same way. Alongside final year students like Sophie, it must be disheartening for first years who barely had time to settle in before we were thrown into distance learning. For a second year student like myself it feels like a massive dip in momentum, like a never-ending Wednesday afternoon. Although lecturers have been working tirelessly to maintain teaching online, video lectures and Microsoft Teams can never replicate the in-person learning experience, and I fear we are losing out on the subtleties of face-to-face team work. I didn’t sign up for an Open University-style course, but distance learning is all we have for now.
Parliament is obliged to address all petitions which receive more than 100,000 signatures. With 319,343 students including myself having signed this one, we await the government’s response in 11 days’ time.
