Freshers’ week commercialism

According to the Guardian “Freshers’ week is an education in commercialism”:

…freshers’ fairs have come a long way from the commercial innocence of earlier years. They offer Britain’s businesses “the perfect opportunity for you to enlighten students to your products and services”, according to BAM Student Marketing. “Get face to face with your potential customers … student spending habits have not been developed at this stage, which is why the freshers’ fairs provide excellent potential for forming new customer relationships,” it adds.

Yes, there is more commercial activity than historically, but there really is so much more to it than this. For example, the University of Nottingham’s Students’ Union has a bit more on offer as the Freshers’ Fair site shows. Whilst there is still in many freshers’ weeks an undue emphasis on alcohol-fuelled activity, things are changing for the better although this remains the issue that newspapers generally focus on.

However, the Guardian also notes that:

Other universities run their own lucrative commercial arrangements at freshers’ fairs. Last year Oxford charged £12,000 for sponsorship and £2,000 for a standard stall at its fair, and £1,500 for a bag insert (plus £850 for your name on the bag).

This is more like “commercial innocence” – it seems to be an extremely good promotional deal for the companies concerned, offering huge exposure for very little money.

Will swine flu end freshers’ week?

The Guardian is reporting that universities may cancel freshers’ week because of swine flu concerns:

Universities are working on emergency plans to postpone freshers’ week activities and shut down parts of their campuses if the swine flu pandemic peaks when students return in September. Contingency plans to slow the spread of the virus, or to cope if the illness cripples staffing levels, include podcasting lectures and quarantining infected students in their halls of residence. There are fears that the start of term could exacerbate the pandemic, with nearly two million students starting or returning to university, and hundreds of thousands crossing the country to begin their courses.

This is a huge challenge for institutions and everyone will be preparing for such eventualities. Whether it will mean an end to freshers’ week traditions remains to be seen but this will be just one of the many difficult issues universities are going to face in the autumn.

It does seem rather unlikely that wholesale podcasting is going to be the answer though.

Getting Freshers to read, discuss and engage

THE reports on a really rather creative initiative at St Andrews

Every new student enrolling at the University of St Andrews this autumn will be sent a novel during the summer and will be encouraged to discuss it with other freshers when they arrive on campus in September. The university is distributing Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a Man Booker-shortlisted work, to all 1,500 new undergraduates in an initiative to give students a common discussion topic and to focus their energies on broad intellectual debate rather than narrow academic study.

This is a terrific idea. Helps with student induction and orientation in halls and ensures that the residential experience has a learning dimension too. Wish we’d thought of it

Hello Freshers: welcoming new students to university

Welcoming new students…

Universities seems to have got an awful lot better at induction in recent years. Judging though by the Cornell University New Students site, UK institutions have quite a long way yet to go.

Although the volume of support material does look a bit overwhelming, it is well organised and accessible. From a UK perspective, the sheer scale of the student support infrastructure is awesome. There is much here we can learn from.

An education in drinking?

According to a recent story in The Times it is “Last orders for boozy freshers”.

THE days of new students being initiated into binge drinking at universities may be numbered. The government is considering plans to clamp down on “freshers’ weeks”, where students are encouraged to consume vast quantities of cheap alcohol.

The prime minister and his policy team have been impressed by experts at a Downing Street seminar who deplored the scale of drunkenness at university. Professor Oliver James, a liver disease specialist and head of the medical faculty at Newcastle University, told Gordon Brown that he was “appalled” by the quantity of drinking during freshers’ week at his university.

There are all sorts of excellent reasons for agreeing with all of this and seeking to change the rationale of freshers’ week from being a training course in excessive drinking to one which is primarily focused on easing the transition to university life and starting the induction and orientation process to help students to get the most out of their higher education. However, it is genuinely difficult to see how this can be driven by government (other than in a general way by imposing substantial rises in duty on alcohol). But, things do have to change and it is, I think, good that government is at least aware of the issue and supportive of change.