Sir, – While some aspects of Diarmaid Ferriter's column on "meddling" parents of third-level students ring true – there is no place for parents directly querying examination results – he fails to recognise many problems of modern university life that affect students and their families ("Meddling parents help third-level students fail test of independence", January 30th).
Universities have changed enormously since his days as an undergraduate student. In addition to the greatly increased awareness of mental health issues and concerns over high drop-out levels since Prof Ferriter’s time as a student, there has been a huge increase in student numbers and class sizes, a reduction in university funding, and a change in the prioritisation between research and education so that the educational, community and pastoral experience of college life has been eroded.
In addition, appropriate time-tabling and quality assurance of courses seem to be very variable, and I am aware of courses with substantial levels of “no-shows” for lectures, poor communication and sketchy and mismatched mechanisms for student feedback.
If such features are embedded in the institutional ethos, it is very difficult for relatively young adult students to tackle these issues with academics who are also assessing them for their exams.
The concerns of parents may reflect these issues, and also the extent to which parents are funding and supporting their adult children in many ways at a time of transition in a system under severe pressure. The financial support can also be significantly greater during Erasmus years abroad, with often little recognition by the universities of the need for clarity on funding and other arrangements for such years for those who will bear the majority of the costs and help deal with the challenges.
Without compromising the independence and confidentiality of student as adults, there is almost certainly more that third-level institutions could do to recognise the supportive role of parents in higher education.
A simple step would be to provide more information on their open access websites on timetabling, course content, indicators of quality assurance and manuals for Erasmus years, rather than the current practice of confining them to local webpages which are only accessible to students and staff.
In addition, a switch towards age-friendly universities and an increase in older students – whose life experience enables them to better manage the subtleties of advocacy and consumerism in education – would be helpful.
Finally, Prof Ferriter might reconsider his call for academics to resist providing digital material to support lectures and tutorials, an appeal which might be open to interpretation as unsupportive of the broad range of learning styles of students and the benefits of blended forms of learning. – Yours, etc,
Prof DESMOND
O’NEILL, MD
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.