The portal has opened, but its glow is far from beckoning… Instead, a rather grim, shadowy darkness looms, eager to swallow me up and spit me out onto a lacklustre graduation ceremony stage…
Katherine Graham
Having just finished three years at ‘London’s Global University’, both my personal and university email inboxes were flooded with insistent subject lines reading: “Final week to buy Graduation tickets!” And yet, I chose not to cash in and attend the Ceremony. “But why?” You might ask, “Do the opening of the Golden Gates of Graduation, the hallowed finale of your three-year undergraduate education, not fill you with unbridled joy?”
Well, it’s not just the fact that the day’s itinerary was damn-near gruelling, with UCL’s graduating pilgrims instructed to first trudge to UCL’s Main Quad – the home of lectures, seminars, tutorials, and 24-hour sessions – to pick up their rental gowns, before traipsing a further 40-minute walk across London to the South of the River so that they might commemorate their time, education, and hard-earned degree in a building that’s closer to LSE’s main campus than their own. Nor is it just the price either, that made me err towards junking the copious Graduation Ceremony alerts in my inbox. No, it was more about how the entire event – price and place included – reflects what the University experience seems to have become: yet another example of late-stage capitalism, where we are sold the dream of a ‘university experience’ by an adept marketing team, only to wake up and realise it was nothing more than just that: a dream, a fantasy from which we would soon awake in our tiny dorm rooms, with worms in our sinks and damp on our ceilings, with a socio-educational experience in dim comparison to what we were glitteringly promised.
But what exposed such a stark difference between the advertisement’s guarantee and the reality? Between the marketed pledge and the actual product?
Was the COVID-19 Pandemic the reason for this realisation, with its restrictions limiting the young generation’s experience of Halls culture by social distancing rules? Which turned club-night “prees” into panic when a lateral-flow test was illumined with that fated double line? Which forced Christmas flat dinners to be cancelled last minute due to a sudden influx of its inhabitants’ dry, persistent coughs?
Or, perhaps, was it an inevitable symptom of our belonging to the tech generation – with attention spans of small gnats – meaning we would much rather look at our phones than endure a painstakingly long Ceremony that lacked the momentous inspiration of an Elle Woods-style speech?
Or have graduates shifted away from pouring more money into the pocket of their University for a reason that reaches back further than this? Perhaps we might trace the slow and fatal decline of Graduation-ticket-holders back to 1998 when University Fees were introduced? Or to the recession when these prices got too damn high?
Or, and this is the big ‘or’, was it the ethos, or lack thereof, of UCL itself that killed the small fire burning in soon-to-be-graduates that made us excited to go at all? Was it, even, in fact, that when A-Level takers stared at their blank UCAS forms, Universities across the country seemed far from an enchanting chrysalis to enter, develop, and eventually leave, after three or four years, a fully formed butterfly – smarter than before, more tuned-in than before, surrounded by a gang of new and interesting friends with whom they would spend their New Year’s Eve in their 60s – as it was so marketed to appear?
I speak for students across the nation when I say that the University did not quite live up to the scintillating standards set by our parents’ stories, nor by the PR team’s savvy social media campaigns: the magazines were neither outlandish nor avant-garde, the fresher fairs were poorly managed, and the atmosphere of Campus (or non-Campus in UCL’s case, with its halls sprawling far and wide) felt far from intimate or welcoming. It was nothing like the burgeoning crock-pot of activities and drinking fests we felt we were promised. And – even worse – we were paying for it this time, through the bloody nose!
Now I know London is an expensive city, but how can a Campus café cost more than the extortionate Pret deli chain? How can the three hours of 00s music, drinks-not-included-(not even water)-events exclude those unable to meet the staggering financial cost and yet somehow manage to provide glowing reviews for the University’s promotional pages? How can I owe the government £27,750 in course fees but my University can’t scrape enough together to pay my teachers sufficient salaries, forcing strike action and interrupting my education? How can a friend, desperate to change her degree to something she might actually enjoy, only achieve this by a full-on, tears-included, meltdown in her head of department’s office?
You might expect an ex-Finals student like myself to jump at the opportunity to hail my University experience, reminisce fondly on memories, and eagerly sign up for my Graduation Ceremony…And yet, I chose not to rent a gown, get tickets for me and my family, make a ‘day of it’, and stand on stage to receive my Degree Certificate for the price of, give or take, £140…
As Hamlet once prophetically uttered, ‘There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ and, indeed, this is how I once felt about my University life – painfully neutral about the whole charade: neither ecstatic nor depressed at the thought of celebrating my experience at Graduation. But after months of freedom from seminar timetables and essay deadlines, my response is no longer the painfully apathetic ‘yeah alright then,’ but a blazing refusal to participate in celebrating a failing system, rendered in the polite, ever-so-British response: ‘No thank you.’
This article appeared on Katherine’s substack.