Undergraduate mental health issues: the challenge of the second year of study

Background: Student mental health is a global issue. Macaskill (2012) reported that the second year was associated with the most significant increases in psychiatric symptoms in UK students. Qualitative data were collected to explore this further. Method: Twenty-three second year undergraduate students were interviewed using a narrative interviewing method to explore their experience of their second year of study. They also completed the GHQ-28. Students were grouped according to their psychiatric caseness scores, giving two groups, a well group with scores ≤ 5 and a clinical case group with scores ≥6 and their interview data were compared. Results: Using thematic analysis, various themes and subthemes were identified. While both groups identified the same issues namely, the first year concerns impacting on the second year, course issues, careers and future employability and student debt, the groups reported very different coping styles. Conclusion: There were shared anxieties across both groups. The majority related to institutional practices and the unintended impact they may be having on student mental health. While specialist interventions would help the clinical caseness group, arguably the anxiety levels of both groups would benefit equally from relatively easy to implement, inexpensive institutional changes and/or additions to current practices in universities

(Re)theorising laddish masculinities in higher education

In the context of renewed debates and interest in this area, this paper reframes the theoretical agenda around laddish masculinities in UK higher education, and similar masculinities overseas. These can be contextualised within consumerist neoliberal rationalities, the neoconservative backlash against feminism and other social justice movements, and the postfeminist belief that women are winning the ‘battle of the sexes’. Contemporary discussions of ‘lad culture’ have rightly centred sexism and men¹s violence against women: however, we need a more intersectional analysis. In the UK a key intersecting category is social class, and there is evidence that while working class articulations of laddism proceed from being dominated within alienating education systems, middle class and elite versions are a reaction to feeling dominated due to a loss of gender, class and race privilege. These are important differences, and we need to know more about the conditions which shape and produce particular performances of laddism, in interaction with masculinities articulated by other social groups. It is perhaps unhelpful, therefore, to collapse these social positions and identities under the banner of ‘lad culture’, as has been done in the past

Student budgets and widening participation: Comparative experiences of finance in low and higher income undergraduates at a Northern Red Brick University

Drawing on a thematic analysis of longitudinal qualitative data (ntotal = 118), this article takes a “whole student lifecycle” approach to examine how lower and higher income students at an English northern red brick university variously attempted to manage their individual budgets. It explores how students reconcile their income—in the form of loans, grants, and bursaries—with the cost of living. Four arenas of interest are described: planning, budgeting, and managing “the student loan”; disruptions to financial planning; the role of familial support; and strategies of augmenting the budget. In detailing the micro‐level constraints on the individual budgets of lower and higher income undergraduates, the article highlights the importance of non‐repayable grants and bursaries in helping to sustain meaningful participation in higher tariff, more selective, higher education institutions. It also supports an emerging body of literature that suggests that the continuing amendments to the system of funding higher education in England are unlikely to address inequality of access, participation, and outcome

Understanding the Under-Attainment of Ethnic Minority Students in UK Higher Education: The Known Knowns and the Known Unknowns

In UK higher education, differences in academic attainment between White students and ethnic minority students are ubiquitous and have persisted for many years. For instance, it has been known for more than 20 years that the academic attainment of ethnic minority students at the first-degree level is poorer than that of White students. Roughly half of the disparity in attainment between White students and non-White students is attributable to differences in their entry qualifications. Nevertheless, the academic attainment of ethnic minority students remains poorer than that of White students even when the effects of their entry qualifications and other variables have been statistically controlled. An explanation put forward by Ogbu (1978, 1983, 1987) based upon the experiences of people from different ethnic minorities in the US does not fit the UK situation. Any differences in the experience of higher education between White and ethnic minority students are not sufficiently large to explain the dramatic differences in their academic attainment. Researchers have yet to identify the factors that are responsible for the ethnic differences in attainment that remain when differences in entry qualifications have been taken into account