In March 2020, Nick Hillman thought that the new coronavirus, recently christened Covid-19 by the World Health Organization, would barely disrupt the university sector.
“We all thought it might impact our lives very briefly, but – a bit like the First World War – we thought it would be over by Christmas,” said Hillman, who is?director of the Higher Education Policy Institution (Hepi). “But then it wasn’t.”
Covid’s total official death toll of was less than half that of the Great War and, in contrast to the war, was concentrated in older people, rather than those of typical student age. Still, experts are generally agreed that there would have been many more deaths had most countries not moved promptly into lockdown in the spring of 2020, while turbocharging and pooling their efforts to study the disease and develop a vaccine.
Five years on, that first wave of lockdowns almost seems like a dream; Richard Watermeyer – who started his current job as professor of education at the University of Bristol on the first day of the UK’s first lockdown, 23 March 2020 – reflects that “for many people, you start talking about Covid and it’s like, ‘did that actually really happen?’”
That sense of unreality relates in part to the breakneck speed with which online teaching was set up: a pace of change previously (and perhaps subsequently) deemed impossible in universities. And while experts in online teaching warned that simply delivering standard lectures over Zoom or Teams was far from best practice, others welcomed it as a long-overdue modernisation of teaching, with digitisation allowing it to become?more student-centred and egalitarian, particularly with regard to?disabled students and those with caring or work commitments.
Hillman’s verdict is that, ultimately, “universities coped really quite well” with the pandemic. But he also thinks that the Covid experience has “left people very uneasy”.
That unease is partly a symptom of ambivalence about how much online teaching should be retained. Students complained about online teaching during the lockdowns and demanded discounts for not receiving the full “university experience”, but some now call for more online learning and lecture capture even as they report increased loneliness (and their parents worry about their social isolation). Academics, meanwhile, complain of sparsely attended lectures but also want flexibility themselves.
John Cater, former vice-chancellor of Edge Hill University, has seen “dramatic” dips in both student confidence and mental health post-Covid, placing greater strain on university and NHS services.?The number of UK students reporting mental health problems?has tripled since 2017. More specifically, since the pandemic, students’ sense of belonging has declined and loneliness has risen, with 26 per cent saying they felt lonely in 2023, compared with 23 per cent in 2022, according to the?. The Office for National Statistics ?in 2021 that during the pandemic, students were particularly prone to feeling lonely, with 22 per cent doing so, compared with 6 per cent among the general popularion.?
Another major factor in that trend is likely to be the recent period of high inflation sparked by pandemic-era pressure on supply chains, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to a cost-of-living crisis for students, squeezing their social budgets and obliging many to spend large chunks of their time in paid work, rather than meeting friends or studying on campus.
The post-pandemic university: how to serve the Covid generation
For instance, last year a report by Hepi and Loughborough University found that England’s maximum maintenance loan – which was ?10,227 for someone living away from home outside London –?only covered 55 per cent of average living costs, with students therefore expected to make up a shortfall of ?8,405 a year. And while the loan is?going up?by 3.1 per cent this year, Hillman noted that its failure to keep up with inflation has meant that the cost-of-living crisis “has hit students harder than just about anybody”. This has exacerbated existing class divides among students, he said, resulting in a “bifurcation” of the student experience.
“There is a group of students who are having very similar experiences to the traditional student experience in the past. But what has changed is they are now a minority, whereas in the past, they were the majority,” Hillman said, adding that 56 per cent of UK students are now undertaking part-time work,??by Hepi and AdvanceHE – a record figure.?
Lucy Hart, union affairs officer at the?University of Leeds’ student union, agreed that the cost-of-living crisis has had a more significant impact on the student experience than the pandemic, noting that her university’s food bank has been much used since its introduction.
The lack of in-person teaching and opportunities for traditional social interaction during the lockdowns led to concerns that student enrolment would nosedive. Yet, according to Ucas figures, UK enrolments jumped from 464,000 in 2019-20 to 485,000 in 2020-21 – the first academic year to start during the pandemic period. That was partly a result of the scrapping of school-leaving exams and the use of teacher-predicted grades for university admissions, which led to many more applicants meeting their grade requirements. But enrolments have stayed high subsequently, too. ?
Nor have dire predictions that international enrolment would never recover from the closure of borders been realised. For instance, in Australia, where those fears were particularly acute given its high dependence on?overseas fees, international commencements were the , and 11 per cent higher than in 2019 – even as, in common with the UK and Canada, the country imposed restrictions on international student visas. The UK's restrictions on dependants' visas saw study visa issuance fall by 14 per cent last year, down again from a peak in 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.?
But the costs of the pandemic and the high-inflation era that followed have certainly affected universities’ coffers, lowering governments’ ability to increase public funding and making it politically difficult to permit rises in tuition fees. So while talk of a “great resignation” post-Covid, as people reassessed their priorities, never translated into reality, waves of compulsory redundancies have swept not only the UK – where more than 10,000 academic staff were made redundant in 2024 alone – but Australia and, more recently, the Netherlands.
Many UK universities’ academic union branches are responding with strike ballots, the latest in a long?series of industrial disputes?over pay, conditions and pensions that has gripped UK higher education over the past few years. And Watermeyer sees the pandemic as a “trigger point” for that unrest: a “violent awakening” for university staff, as they were left to cope with the enormously time-consuming transition to online teaching and provide pastoral care to large numbers of struggling students even as they themselves juggled caring responsibilities and personal anxieties.
“A lot of the concerns around work intensification and the deterioration of healthy working cultures predate the pandemic, but I think what the pandemic did was kind of put it into a more acute focus,” Watermeyer said. “It focused people’s minds in terms of [asking themselves] ‘can we tolerate this?’”
Bruce Macfarlane,?chair professor of educational leadership and dean of the Faculty of Education and Human Development at The Education University of Hong Kong,?argued at the beginning of the pandemic that, despite many proclamations to the contrary, Covid was unlikely to change universities forever. However, he feels that his predictions at the time?–?that universities would use the pandemic as an excuse to accelerate?pre-existing trends,?such as the growth of teaching-only contracts" and the pursuit of?"efficiency gains in staffing and course delivery?–?have been borne out by reality.?The shift to online teaching, Macfarlane pointed out, took a “big toll on staff and ate further into [their ] time available for research. How many of these Covid measures, often taken very quickly and with limited consultation, have been reversed post Covid?”
Hillman also agrees that the pandemic put “rocket boosters” under arguments “that?the staff- student ratio in higher education is too generous, because if you believe [that] students can be taught over Zoom, then you can get away perhaps with a lower staff-student ratio”.
A lowering has been mooted internally by Cardiff University in a document leaked in the wake of its announcement of 400 job losses in January.??
As well as lectures, academic conferences also went online during the pandemic period. At the time, this was hailed by some as a great leveller, allowing junior scholars, those from?developing countries and those with caring responsibilities to attend as easily as the highly funded Westerners who typically make up the vast majority of delegates. The environmental advantages of virtual conferences were also?recognised as universities struggled to reconcile academic travel with their net zero commitments.
But?even though technological attempts were made to provide breakout rooms, where online conference delegates could virtually mingle informally, many people felt that this was no match for the encounters at in-person events that can result in fruitful collaborations and revolutionise research directions. Nor have suggestions been adopted that the post-Covid conference be held both virtually and?in person or adopt a flipped approach, with talks continuing to be given online and the in-person element focused on discussion.
Moreover, while the mainstreaming of a blended model of learning is typically touted as the main legacy of the pandemic in higher education, Thomas Lancaster, principal teaching fellow in the department of computing at Imperial College London, said that while?Covid-19?may have accelerated the shift, “had the pandemic not come along, there probably would have been another catalyst for change. It may have been generative artificial intelligence.” And he certainly believes that “AI is likely to have more impact on the future of student learning than the pandemic” in terms of boosting “possibilities for more innovative approaches to learning and teaching”.
Perhaps, then, the most significant direct legacy of the pandemic for higher education may reveal itself not in the lecture theatre or conference hall but in the courtroom. Hillman said that UK universities are watching an ongoing court case against UCL “very, very closely” as about 5,000 pandemic-era students seek discounts in their tuition fees. A ruling in their favour could “send shockwaves through the sector”, he says.
In 2026, the High Court in London is set to?hear a series of test cases regarding the students’ allegations that UCL breached its contract with them?when it cancelled classes or moved them online and restricted access to facilities.
Student Group Claim, the organisation coordinating the legal action, said that, nationwide, roughly 170,000 UK students have instructed law firms to seek compensation from more than 100 universities. And the consequences could indeed be massive, agrees Shimon Goldwater, a commercial litigator at Asserson, who is representing the UCL students. If the UCL case is successful, it will increase the likelihood that other claims will be granted. And with the average UK undergraduate potentially entitled to ?5,000 in damages, rising to ?10,000 for international students, the cost of meeting such claims is likely to be in “the millions per university”, according to Goldwater.
As for the legacy of Covid on campus atmosphere, Cater “would like to think that the effects of the pandemic and people being out of the school system [during the lockdowns] start actually to become less significant as time moves on”. But he said, there has been an enduring shift, “not for the better”, whereby “the qualification has become more important than experience, [whereas] I would like to think, actually, that experience of education is more important than the qualification”.
Hillman also worries that the psychological impact of the pandemic is still being felt on UK campuses nearly four years after the lifting of England’s third and final lockdown. “I’m not totally convinced that the really vibrant student life has quite come back to how it was,” he says. “That worries me, because it looks like it’s becoming a semi-permanent change…rather than a temporary change that only impacts one cohort.” And his overall assessment is that “higher education would probably be in a slightly better place…if Covid had never happened”.
And if the experience of Leeds’ Hart is representative, it does seem that students remain more withdrawn than they used to be. “There’s a weird culture,” says Hart, who graduated last summer. “If you’re in a lecture and you don’t know someone, you leave a chair between the two of you. Maybe it’s a social distancing thing…some people do go out and go out for lunch with their course [mates] and mix. But I think a lot do just go to uni, headphones in, sit by themselves and go home again.”
