Last week, I went to my first house viewing and realised I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It seems as if I have barely been at university for five minutes and suddenly have been thrown into an unknown world of rent, contracts and bills, all with a group of people that I didn’t know existed three months ago. ‘I am not ready for this’, I thought to myself. These feelings lead me nicely to the hotly debated topic as to whether university is adequately preparing students for the so called ‘real world’ that lies, huge and ominous, beyond the safe containment of the classroom.
The websites, articles, and forums that I have read tend to vehemently argue that no, students are not sufficiently prepared for real life as the primarily theoretical style of learning does not translate into workplace practices and beyond. To further explore this, I put out my own survey asking current and old students if they felt that university prepared them for ‘real life’; the results were somewhat surprising. 62% of respondents answered that yes, they believed it did.
The reasons given by the 38% who did not believe they were sufficiently prepared tended to fall within the same lines: they had not been told how to rent or buy a property, pay bills or taught about taxes. It is true that university does not provide you with a step-by-step guide on these practices, however it does equip you with a repertoire of skills that you can carry with you after you graduate.
Being a student teaches you independence: How to cook, clean, look after your physical health and mental wellbeing. Moreover, the different teaching and learning style at university as opposed to earlier education equips you with new skills, even if this is happening subconsciously. Courses tend to move away from simply memorising and rewriting information, teaching you instead how to analyse and evaluate arguments, think critically about problems and consider multiple different approaches and perspectives. This enables students to broaden their perspectives and find solutions to problems, both useful skills to take forward with you into the world.
This is not to say that improvements cannot be made. More education on practises such as money management in the form of classes and workshops could be introduced. However, these should not be compulsory as taking initiative and control over your own life is a part of the real world; you are not going to be spoon fed everything. University encourages independent learning, and it is those who use this to their advantage, instead of seeing this as a way to do the least amount of work possible, that will be in the best position moving forward. In real life, you have to take it upon yourself to learn relevant skills and be responsible for your own future.
Looking at whether students are prepared for ‘real life’ begs the question of if anyone is ever really ready for the real world, whatever that may be. I certainly did not feel ready to leave home and look after myself at university, but I did it because I had no other choice. You have to learn how to cook, or you won’t eat, you have to learn how to effectively manage money, or you will run out, you have to learn how to switch on a washing machine or (you would be surprised) you will have no clothes to wear. So, can the same be said of every new stage of your life? Sometimes, the best way to learn is to be dropped in the deep end; to be forced to teach yourself how to swim or else you will sink.
Perhaps the reason that many students believe they are not prepared for the wider world is because they have not explicitly been taught how to ‘adult’. However, if you pause to think about the implicit skills and life lessons that you will have garnered over the years of your schooling, you will probably realise that you are more ready than you think. And even if you’re not, is this such a bad thing? Maybe the best way to learn is to be thrown to the wolves and to adapt and overcome as you go. In this respect, I believe that a good way to view university is as a trial run for real life, where you are exposed to new experiences and challenges in a safe setting, with help available if (okay, when) it all gets a bit too much.
