There is a certain type of Dub you meet in pubs, often late on an afternoon, when the day’s betting has yielded its fruits, bitter or better, a man who hates stepping outside to smoke but does so willingly for the opportunities it gives to bellyache. No matter what the subject, he has an opinion and a beef. And he doesn’t like students.
Indeed, this man has a way of saying ‘stew-dents’ that dismisses all measure of youth and exuberance. A bleedin’ waste of space, he’ll say.
Quite what students have done to deserve his opprobrium in recent years is unclear. On the whole, relative to a generation ago, modern students are pretty quiet, only taking to the streets in their own right on issues that directly affect them as students.
Maybe it’s the degree to which society in general reflects Baby Boomer attitudes, beliefs and concerns. We’re all youths now. What’s to protest about any more?
Maybe it’s the way in which a kind of issue and protest that was once seen to be the preserve of students is now embraced by the population at large like, for example, the anti-war marches of recent times. Maybe it’s the way that student bars and clubs have taken students out of many mainstream activities.
Or maybe it’s the way studenthood itself has been broadened. Where students were a privileged minority little more than a generation ago, now they represent a majority – in the sense that the majority of people born in a given year – say 1987 – continue into higher education.
And an increasingly high proportion of ‘second-timer’ adult learners also participate in higher education too. We are a long way off the 40% found in some other European countries, but we’re getting there.
This year marks a watershed. The numbers coming through from the Leaving Certificate are at historically low figures. The pressure is off. As the Irish Times (which itself initiated the hysteria) recently noted, ‘the points race is now over’. So, a lot of people are getting pretty much what they want.
There will be new pressures. The universities have been complaining about literacy levels and a literary debilitation deriving from texting. They’ll be demanding extra resources to add writing classes.
But in the whole, how it will be for the next few years is very different from how it has been for the last decades. Between lower points, more courses (especially vocationally oriented ones) and more adult returners, the old image of a higher education college as some kind of ivory tower for gilded youth is less and less apt.
That doesn’t mean that time in college can’t be the best time of your life. Whether first timer or returner, the time spent in higher education is, or should be, full of excitement and challenge, jam-packed with new experiences, experiments and pleasures.
For most first timers, their time in higher education is when they sort a lot of stuff out for themselves. It’s the time when they detach from home and start to sort out the person they’ll be, including vocational and sexual identities. For older students, quite often it’s a return to how they really wanted to be before life got in their path…
For all students, it’s a time when they engage with learning in a way unimaginable in school, a time of ideas, of knowledge rather than information, and a time when they are given control of their own learning. It’s all up to you.
So, there’ll be parties and raising hell. There’ll be sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, hangovers and fuzzy memories. There’ll be more than a few morning after pills.
But there’ll also space and nothingness. Some of the best times are spent just hanging around with friends chilling, doing crosswords or sudoku, playing cards. There’ll be curiosity and experimentation and new discoveries. There will be enlightenment.
The classic Dub won’t understand, but that’s what being a stew-dent is all about, shedding one skin and growing another, becoming something new, personal, finding and becoming yourself.
Enjoy the trip and fuck the begrudgers.