The scandal of two-tier degrees Extra time infantilizes students

As the academic year draws to a close, students up and down the country will be receiving their degrees. So, consider two different cases:

Student A arrived at their university with a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, and autism. As a result, he had a long-standing arrangement that all deadlines could be automatically deferred without supporting evidence. All exams came with 20% extra time. He could retake these exams without any marks being capped — and rewrite his coursework too. Despite all this, Student A didn’t manage to complete requirements by the end of second year. He was therefore allowed to finish off his outstanding pieces of work while living at home with mum and dad over the summer. When he returned in third year, he still struggled to make deadlines. After delaying final submission of work via an extension period in late August, he eventually had enough credits to pass the year — and was awarded a 2:1 classification.

Student B took the same course as Student A, but had no diagnosed learning disabilities. During her second year she received one deadline extension after a nasty bout of flu, but other than that, she completed all her assignments on time. Sometimes this meant that she had to rush when juggling deadlines; her marks occasionally suffered. She too was awarded a 2:1 classification.

My question is: should these 2:1s be considered equivalent? To my mind, there are reasons to think not. 

Now, it could well be that Student A is just as capable as Student B and, despite all the accommodations, worked harder to get his 2:1 than she did. We don’t need to be dismissive cynics here. (That said, it could have been the other way around).

Nevertheless, a degree is a qualification, and not simply a measure of intelligence. Intelligence is (probably) the most important thing that a degree requires, at least in traditional academic subjects. But a degree also signals that one can organize that intelligence under pressure. It indicates that one has cultivated, improved, and refined one’s abilities over several years, working within agreed-upon constraints. This doesn’t mean that we should never support students. Independence, like intelligence, can be cultivated, and both benefit from guidance. But a degree should be a combination and reflection of both.

Now, it might be objected that this isn’t fair on Student A. If he hadn’t had his accommodations, he wouldn’t have been able to complete his degree! He was always bright enough — he just needed (a lot) more time, and (a lot) more support. Surely it is only fair to provide that, precisely because of different starting needs? 

This ideology — that of fairness — is the dominant one in universities today. Enormous bureaucracies exist to facilitate, entrench, and maintain it. And if you think my hypothetical Student A is an outlier, think again. UK academics will confirm that many, many students fit this description. (We have the MS Teams invitations, the personal tutor emails, the resubmitted coursework, to prove it.) So what’s my problem? Well, I think that good intentions have paved the way to a situation that benefits nobody.

First off, if we’re going to talk about fairness, what about fairness to Student B? She might point out that if she had received more time — if she had been able to push back and stagger deadlines — then she could have performed better in her final classification. Now, you might counter that the accommodations extended to Student A were merely a way of “leveling the playing field” — compensating for an unfair disadvantage. But ought Student B to accept this? 

I’m doubtful. Let’s leave aside the very real fact that some students (and their parents) are taking advantage of expanded medical diagnoses precisely to gain competitive advantages. Let’s instead grant that Student A is not gaming the system and genuinely couldn’t complete his degree without extensive accommodations. Is Student B making a mistake if she replies: “Well, if A can’t finish on time, under the same general constraints as other students like me — why should he get a degree?” To put it bluntly, I don’t think so: the two are no longer running the same race. And if they are not running the same race, they shouldn’t get the same medal.

That paragraph will ruffle feathers. As a university teacher, shouldn’t my commitment be to the intrinsic value of learning? Shouldn’t I, of all people, consider a degree to be determined by nothing but intellectual ability — everything else be damned? It may also seem that I am therefore simply heartless with regards to cases like Student A, that I believe they should be sacrificed on the altar of market competition in a financially corrupted university sector. 

But in fact, I think it is people like Student A who may be losing out the most. This is because universities have boxed themselves into a very strange position. In a nutshell, we now take learning disabilities, and other medicalized disadvantages, as being immutable. We increasingly treat them as defining aspects of a person, presumed to set hard limits on what students can or cannot be expected to do. And this is not good for them.

If at this point you are thinking “yeah, yeah, middle-aged white man who lacks empathy for the disabled” — well no, actually. I speak from brutal personal experience. In 2023, I broke my neck in a rock climbing accident, leaving me paralyzed from the collarbones down. In a moment my life was shattered. I spent a year in hospitals and care homes, adjusting to a life of severe disability entailing extensive dependence on others. I still can’t walk, control my bladder or bowels, or use my hands properly. It is not easy. But I was lucky enough to spend four months at the intensive spinal rehabilitation unit at Stanmore in West London.

The truth is I hated my time there — easily the worst four months of my life. I was trying to psychologically adjust to the unimaginable, while living 24/7 on a busy hospital ward in a crumbling NHS. But the team there stuck by me, even on the days when I collapsed from exhaustion, literally cried that I couldn’t do it anymore. And looking back, I appreciate one thing in particular: that my physio and occupational therapists consistently encouraged me to overcome. 

Don’t get me wrong. They didn’t give me false hope or unrealistic expectations. They ensured that a sober realism about the negligible prospects of neurological recovery was always front and center. The biological facts were what they were. They straight up told me that I was almost certainly never going to walk again — that I just had to accept this fact (and many others). But what the team consistently instilled was that my disability did not determine my destiny. Yes, my life was now going to be harder. Yes, it was going to be seriously limited in important ways. But my fate was not set — and the worst thing I could do was to pretend otherwise, or the prophecy would become self-fulfilling.

It took me a long time to take this fully on board; to really understand what they were trying to tell me. To come to believe it for myself. But if I hadn’t received this crucial psychological orientation, I would have given in to the voice that said: you will never go back to work; you will never again have a life worth living; there is no point trying, so just give up. I would have let my disability define me. Instead — slowly, painfully, with many false starts — something like the opposite has become true.

So now I’m back at work, full time, in some ways against the odds, with a life worth living. And what do I find? A generation of students receiving the opposite of the lesson I received at Stanmore, enabled by the very educational authorities supposed to help them. 

Take, for example, a diagnosis of ADHD. One response could be to acknowledge that this condition is going to present challenges — but use the diagnosis as an opportunity for structuring activities to make tasks more manageable, perhaps proceeding differently from peers. With time, a student might find that their symptoms lessen, or that they develop better strategies, which means that their ADHD generates less of a problem for them. 

This, however, is overwhelmingly not the way it is done. Instead the diagnosis is taken as a fixed fact, and rather than the student being required to adapt in the light of it, it is the university that must adapt around the student. So instead of having to manage deadlines, it is the deadlines that become negotiable. Instead of the diagnosis providing an opportunity to strategize about how to adapt, it is taken as a baseline that no adaptation is possible. The student becomes a passive victim, around whom we must tread on eggshells. More than once, I have wanted to say: “Look, just get on with it, in the long run this will do you good.” But it is simply not worth my job to say it out loud. Tough love is verboten.

This is periodically frustrating for me — but it is worse for the students. While I would love nothing more than to be paid by the state to have interesting conversations, this is just not what universities are anymore. Students use their degrees to signal: to employers, to recruiters, to advanced education institutions. They are competing on the market for graduate positions. A Faustian pact it may be, but UK higher education is now locked into the deal. The students pay exorbitant fees, which keep the universities in business (for now), and in return academics are supposed to instruct them to a level of competence signaled by a degree, that they can then use on the job market.

The problem is, we are now frequently awarding degrees to people who cannot meet the requirements that having a degree signals. Despite being adults who can vote, join the military, or go to prison if they commit crimes, undergraduates are increasingly treated like children, with vast bureaucracies acting in loco parentis. One consequence of this bizarre culture shift is that we are not keeping our side of the bargain and not delivering the goods: certifying that all our graduates are independent qualified adults. 

Campaigners for racial equality warn of the “soft bigotry of low expectations”: that lowering standards in the name of “inclusion” is a disservice to the very minority groups allegedly being helped. Something like this is now true in education. Tough love may be largely verboten, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real possibility. It is sometimes precisely what’s required. They know this in the NHS, where I learned it up close. Why, in universities, have we forgotten it?

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