Why Are University Students So Oddly Passive and Disengaged?

Yesterday, one of my students came to see me. She had failed her exam, and wanted some ‘feedback’ on how she could improve. I of course agreed, and we sat down together to look at her paper, for which she had received a mark of 13 out of 100 (the requirement to pass being 40).

What was immediately evident was that she simply had not displayed any real knowledge about the subject she had been studying ostensibly for a year. One could have put the exam questions to somebody down at the local pub and received broadly the same kind of common sense (and wrong) responses. I put it to her that in order to pass a subject at university, it is necessary to know something about it – and that the reason she had failed was because she evidently did not in this case really know anything about the area which the exam concerned.

Strangely (I was expecting her to insist that she had studied hard for the exam or come up with some kind of ‘my hamster died’ excuse for her performance) she readily conceded my point. In fact, she displayed a blithe indifference to the idea that there might be anything shameful in not knowing anything about a subject she had been studying for many months, at a cost of almost £10,000 in tuition fees alone. “I didn’t really revise,” she said. “And I only really came to the first couple of lectures.”

“How about I give you some feedback when you put in some effort?” is what I wanted to say, but didn’t. I of course was a bit more polite than that. But I did tell her that the only ‘feedback’ I could give was that she might think about studying properly and actually reading things – and then try to display an understanding of what she had read. She took this as one would take a recommendation from a doctor that one ought to go on a diet: with a wincing acknowledgement that I was probably right, conveyed in such a way as to imply that she would probably go on stuffing her face with black forest gateau.

What is one to make of this attitude? The university I work for is by no means at the lower end of the scale and we ostensibly recruit students with decent ‘A’ levels or at least lots of UCAS points (not necessarily the same thing). But this oddly passive, disengaged stance is becoming increasingly common – I’d indeed say it characterises the majority of the student body in my department. My students almost seem to take the suggestion that they might have to study to get a degree as an affront. And they display, if not contempt, then a profound indifference to the educational experience. It is as though they exist at a level of psychic distance from their learning: it is something that is just supposed to happen, somehow, without them ever really having to do anything about it.

Older people of course have always complained that younger people don’t know anything and are feckless, and it has always been the case that university students don’t study hard enough, especially in their first year. But this level of disengagement is genuinely new. When I first started teaching at university, taking a class was often like traffic control: all of the students would attend, would have prepared by doing the required reading, and would be intellectually engaged – even if they were wrong, they would merrily voice their opinions and offer answers to questions. Fast forward ten years and attendance is abysmal (it isn’t unusual for literally only one or two students out of a class list of ten or twelve to show up to tutorials), students almost never adequately prepare, and the atmosphere in classes is often one of stony silence – like delivering a seminar to a class full of cats, or trees, or a wall on which paint is drying.

It is too easy to say that the lockdowns caused this, although they undoubtedly accelerated a trend – one can’t spend 18 months telling young people that in-person education is basically optional and doesn’t really matter and expect it to have no effect on how much they value the endeavour. It is also much too easy to blame the introduction of tuition fees – you would expect people to work harder for a qualification if they are paying a lot of money for it, and in any case students were paying fees back when I started in 2012 and were perfectly well motivated then. All academics have their own pet theories as to where the problem lies. My own view is not exactly that social media is to blame but rather the fact that, thanks to the development of streaming, young people are now reared by screens to an extent that was never previously possible, and develop a stunted, passive outlook as a consequence (why do anything if you can just turn on Netflix or YouTube and be mindlessly entertained?).

Whatever the cause, it is terrifying to witness first hand just how shallow the lives of so many young people now are, how disengaged they seem not just from learning but from the world around them, and how deep is their apparent lack of personal agency. The idea that it is within their grasp to improve their lives through effort seems to have been squeezed out of them (if they ever knew it to begin with) as though by a vice. This makes me fearful not just about the future of our politics but about the future of our economy and our culture: what happens to a society when its young adults are so disconnected from the exercise of living and so apparently uninterested in being good at things or learning anything of value? It won’t be pretty, that’s for sure.

Conservative commentators and politicians have gravitated towards a vision of universities being ‘in crisis’ due to capture by the Left or the woke. That too is a serious matter but of an order of magnitude less consequence than the vapidity and sloth, and contempt for the pursuit of excellence, which is so starkly in evidence among the student body. This is what we need to begin to grapple with, but I don’t think there is a politician in the land who is capable of even beginning to acknowledge the problem.

Busqueros is a pseudonym.