In this post, Dr Neil Speirs, discusses how we can respond to the Cost of Living crisis on campus through engaging in policies, processes and practices that are compassionately aware and engaged with the reality of life for all of our students. Neil is the University’s Widening Participation manager. This post belongs to the Hot Topic theme: Critical insights into contemporary issues in Higher Education.
Introduction
Since late 2021, the prices for many essential goods began increasing faster than household incomes, resulting in a fall in real incomes. Newspapers and television broadcasts have discussed this Cost of Living Crisis at great length – while governments have provided a series of cost-of-living payments to low-income households. However, as Patrick & Pybus (2022) note, ‘there is never a good time for a crisis, but this one feels almost cruelly ill timed, coming as it does when the nation continues to feel the economic, social, and political impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic’.
In their most recent report, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (2024) tell us that ‘Living standards…..have fallen by some 7 per cent on average across the distribution relative to 2019’, and this fall in living standards has hurt the bottom half of income distribution the most. The report is not so hopeful regarding the coming years, projecting ‘that the living standards of households in the bottom 40 per cent of the population will not return to pre-pandemic levels before April 2028’.
Life in the academy is not immune to these issues. As the Office for National Statistics (2023) outline, some 92% of students in higher education reported that their cost of living had increased on the previous year while 91% were either somewhat or very worried about the rising cost of living. In this post, I argue that we, as educators (as part of the global human family), need to adopt a pedagogical approach based on Freire’s pedagogy of love and hope in order to compassionately ease the way for students through times of great distress and discomfort.
Less than £50 a month
We will all be aware of students that we know who are worried about increasing debt and a lack of sufficient student loans and bursaries. Indeed, the National Union of Students’ report ‘Cost of Living Crisis – HE Students’ (2022) makes it clear that more than a quarter of students have less than £50 a month after paying rent and bills. A Universities UK report from 2023 outlined two major areas of concern regarding the impact of the ongoing crisis on students: firstly, student mental health concerns; and, secondly, the ability of our students to be able to afford to continue with their studies.
Recently, Dabrowski et al (2024) reported that for students, ‘the financial strain they have been experiencing during the past year had specifically triggered a mental health decline’. In fact, the authors point out that for some students their, ‘whole existence had become impinged by financial concerns, worrying about the ever-increasing cost of products and services’, and how ‘the cost-of-living burden was primarily responsible for…..rapidly declining mental health’. It is more than understandable how, in such circumstances, students will very naturally question the possibility of continuing and completing their course.
In such challenging circumstances, doing your homework is not the priority. Indeed, the authors (ibid) assert that it would be wise for government to ‘carefully examine the interface between the student loan/bursary system and Universal Credit, with a focus on fostering equitable and vital access for students with complex needs and circumstances, including those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds’.
Nothing new
For a particular portion of the student population, financial hardship is nothing new. There is no new cost of living crisis – this is, and has, always been daily life. Many students from working class backgrounds, particularly those whose life is dominated by poverty, have grown up in families where going without to get by is the norm. Katriona O’Sullivan (2023, p. 274) writes about how, ‘being poor effects everything you do and everything you are’ and how ‘for so much of my life I literally had nothing’. Try to conceptualise the way that poverty can overwhelmingly dominate and consume us, and how, as O’Sullivan notes, ‘being poor controls how you see yourself, how you trust and speak, how you see the world and how you dream’.
As the Cost of Living Crisis continues, we might note the work of The Sutton Trust (2023), who report on how students from lower socio-economic backgrounds were more likely to report skipping meals to save on food costs. They also highlight how the proportion of students who said their financial situation had worsened since the last academic year was higher for students from working-class than middle-class backgrounds. But we also must be aware that after the headlines change and the crisis is officially confined to history, that many students will continue to live through a perpetual cost of living crisis.
So, now more than ever, we must engage critically to be cognisant of this inequality regime (Piketty, 2021) and how ‘inequality is primarily political and ideological’ (ibid) – there is nothing natural about it. As Moraga (2015) writes, we need to ‘enter upon an informed and re-envisioned strategy for social/political change’ that will address the failures of the current system and remove the unjustifiable symbolic violence of poverty (Nussey, 2021).
We are not isolated
How do we respond to this on campus? What can we do for and with our students? Initially, we may feel overwhelmed – paralysed to act, we may wonder what can I do that’s going to be meaningful. But if we simply focus on how we can respond on campus (still aware of course of the wider social and political change that is required). I am of the view that the only way to respond is through Freire’s pedagogy of love and hope (Freire, 1996; Darder, 2017). As Freire tells us, a pedagogy of love is the foundation of dialogue and praxis – and we certainly need both. It rejects neoliberal entrepreneurial individualism and celebrates the solidarity of community. In this context solidarity is ‘an ethical project committed to transformation’, which ‘is relational because no one is in solidarity alone or with themselves’ (Gaztambide-Fernández et al, 2022).
Dean (1996, p348) rather neatly surmises this as ‘solidarity is taking care of oneself to be able to show up for others’. As bell hooks (2000) wrote ‘love is an act of will –namely, both an intention and an action’. This action can be expressed through the simple act of caring about our students. As Walker & Gleaves (2016) outline, caring in practice ‘appears to comprise two main pedagogic elements – the active fostering of and maintenance of pedagogic relationships above all else, and within these, the privileging of trust, acceptance, diligence and individual attentiveness’.
We must choose the privilege of trust, acceptance and love – over what the authors (ibid) note as all too often is the norm; ‘there have been many times when I’ve sat as a senior member of staff, on academic boards and mitigation committees, and it’s seemed to be that academics make the flimsiest of judgments about people’s lives imaginable, with scant knowledge about how that will affect their future progress’.
So, collectively we need a renewed way of life on campus that employs a selection of policies, practices and pedagogies that are filled with the social justice of Freire’s pedagogy of love. A renewed way of life on campus that delights in the privilege of trust, acceptance and love. And a renewed way of life that is compassionately aware and engaged with the reality of life for all of our students.
This pedagogy of love and true care builds on an understanding of how ‘others live through us. We are not isolated, autonomous selves; rather, we are always connected’ (Roberts, 2013, p. 41). From here, we might begin to celebrate our renewed way of life on campus and challenge the inequality regime that has such a profound impact on so many lives – and as O’Sullivan (ibid) notes leaves many ‘feeling like I had no worth’.
References
Bhattacharjee, A., Pabst, A. & Smith, R. (2024). National Institute of Economic and Social Research – General Election Briefing. London.
Dabrowski, V., Atas, N., Ramsey, T., & Howarth, N. (2024). ‘Money anxiety’: Understanding HE students’ experiences of the cost‐of‐living crisis. Social Policy & Administration.
Darder, A. (2017). Reinventing Paulo Freire: A pedagogy of love. Routledge.
Dean, J. (1996). Solidarity of strangers: Feminism after identity politics. University of California Press.
Freire, P (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Classics: UK.
Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Brant, J., & Desai, C. (2022). Toward a pedagogy of solidarity. Curriculum Inquiry, 52(3), 251-265.
Hooks, B. (2000). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.
Moraga, C. (2015). Catching fire: Preface to the fourth edition. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of colour (4th ed., pp. xv–xxvi). SUNY Press.
National Union of Students (2022). Cost of Living Crisis – HE Students. Accessed August 2024: https://assets.nationbuilder.com/nus/pages/181/attachments/original/1669035472/NUS_Cost_of_Living_Research_November_2022_-_Higher_Education_Students.pdf?1669035472
National Union of Students Scotland (2023). Fighting for Students – The Cost of Survival. Accessed August 2024: https://assets.nationbuilder.com/nus/pages/358/attachments/original/1676990009/NUS_Cost_of_living_Crisis_presentation_reduced.pdf?1676990009
Nussey, Charlotte (2021) ‘A long way from earning’: reproducing violence at the nexus of shame and blame. Oxford Development Studies, Vol 49, 1.
Office for National Statistics (2023). Cost of living and higher education students – statistical bulletin. Accessed August 2024: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/educationandchildcare/bulletins/costoflivingandhighereducationstudentsengland/30januaryto13february2023
O’Sullivan, K. (2023). Poor: grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief. Penguin Books: UK.
Patrick, R., & Pybus, K. (2022). Cost of living crisis: we cannot ignore the human cost of living in poverty. bmj, 377.
Piketty, T. (2021). Capital and ideology: A global perspective on inequality regimes. British Journal of Sociology, 72(1).
Roberts, P. (2013). Paulo Freire in the 21st century: Education, dialogue, and transformation. Paradigm.
The Sutton Trust. (2023). Cost-of-living and university students. Savanta.
Universities UK (2023). Cost of living crisis: impact on university students. Accessed August 2024. https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/publications/cost-living-crisis-impact-university
Walker, C., & Gleaves, A. (2016). Constructing the caring higher education teacher: A theoretical framework. Teaching and teacher education, 54, 65-76.
Neil Speirs
Dr Speirs’ role involves working as a manager, practitioner and researcher in a number of areas concerning widening participation & access and related policy. He has strategic oversight and management of a number of self-generated community projects. These projects along with his teaching and research are centred around a number of areas of interest that span from primary education through secondary, further and higher education. A few of these areas of interest and specialisms are; the transition from primary to secondary education, the academic achievement of working class young males, the sociology of sport, widening participation student transitions, the equity of student experience, social reproduction & critical pedagogy, the working class mature student, the hidden curriculum, peer-related pedagogies and autoethnography.
