The conversation around students’ manifest absence from the classroom has been making louder noises this month, when diverse reports have been issued. In The Times Higher Education, Paul Basken announced on December 6 that “Class attendance in US universities [is] ‘at record low’” due to “online hype, mental stress, adjunct reliance and job-centric mindsets.” Academics, Basken reports, “said that Covid lockdowns had normalised the idea of students skipping classes or watching them remotely.” His article is a rather good summary of the situation. Each of us, teachers, had assumed that students’ disaffection is a personal issue caused by faults in our teaching, but it turns out this is a structural problem with an international dimension, in part caused by Covid-19’s lockdown.
Skipping classes occasionally is not a problem, and there have always been students who have spent plenty of time away from the classroom. I don’t refer here in this post, in any case, to students who cannot be in class because they need paid employment (an issue that should be solved with grants), or are ill in any way, but to students who could perfectly attend class but choose not to. This percentage has been growing steadily, so that if five years ago you might expect 20% of university students to be away occasionally, now only 20%-30% attend classes regularly (my personal experience appears to be quite representative). A fellow teacher complained, besides, in our last Departament meeting that her second-year students may be present at the beginning of her lecture but often leave suddenly with no explanation. We have decided to draft a document explaining what is expected from students and why that kind of behaviour is not right.
Both in the UK and the USA the problem of truancy affects also primary and secondary school, whereas here in Spain there seems to be no major concern around this issue. The very complete report by Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite, and Lee Elliot Major published on the website of the London School of Economics and Political Science and titled “The rising tide of school absences in the post-pandemic era,” concludes that “We now face a national education crisis in the post-pandemic era: a huge slice of the COVID generation have never got back into the habit of regularly attending school.” In 2021/22, “23.5 per cent of pupils missed 10 or more sessions” in England, where the pre-pandemic figure was 4.4%. The authors warn that this new chronic absenteeism is general, and not limited as before to deprived areas. They speak of “a breakdown in trusting relationships between parents and teachers alongside increasing unhappiness with the narrow academic curricula schools are measured by.”
It is important to note that although the children may be reluctant to attend school, the parents are allowing them to stay home in a sort of complicit truancy. Many parents simply cannot force their children to go to school, and even support their choice to stay home, missing many precious hours of teaching, which will certainly impact their education. A report by the public policy research agency Public First confirms that, as Sally Weale writes in The Guardian, “Parents in England no longer subscribe to the view that their children need to be in school full-time.” The situation is very similar in the USA, “with more than 25% of students nationwide chronically absent, missing 10% or more of classes, according to the U.S. Department of Education,” as Lauren Lantry reports. Another report, by Bianca Vázquez Toness, bemoans that “Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US,” with Alaska taking the lead with a staggering 49% of truant school children.
Meanwhile, in Spain there is a worrying silence about the situation. I had to dig really deep to find a piece on truancy, perhaps because the figures were already high before the pandemic. Martín Anguita reports that, according to research by Emma García, an economist specializing in education of Washington’s Economic Policy Institute, in the post-lockdown year 2020-21, 23.2% of teen students missed class once or twice every fortnight, while 6.5% skipped classes more regularly (the worst figures were for the community of Asturias, with 35% of absentee students). Anguita does not even mention Covid-19 among the causes for concern, focusing instead on the mostly disadvantaged students absent from class.
The new Informe CYD 2023 on the situation of the Spanish university has finally called attention to the absenteeism of university students in the post-Covid-19 era. The article in El País by Elisa Silió, comments not only on that absence but on the falling student performance. Silió borrows the concept of the ‘encapsulated’ student from Ana Pagès Santacana, of Universitat Ramon Llull of Barcelona, which refers to students who have not managed to truly break away from their Covid-19 isolation. Referring to the CYD report, Silió comments that the generous grades awarded to secondary school students during lockdown means that they have reached higher education with a lower preparation than required. Their frustration when facing demanding tasks they cannot cope with generates frustration, hence their absence. The lockdown period, besides, taught students that classroom presence is not indispensable and they have started demanding that universities use a hybrid system, by which lectures are made available online, a methodology teachers generally dislike and universities do not encourage, afraid of losing students to online universities. The subtitle of the article by Pau Alemany and Sara Castro “Sillas vacías en la Universidad” reproduces the self-explanatory words of one of those absentee students: “I’d rather make the most of my time studying the subject on my own” [“Preferiría aprovechar el tiempo adelantando la asignatura por mi cuenta”].
Clearly, then, students are missing from our classroom because they believe that being present is a waste of time. I do agree that subjects taught using lectures with no interaction between teacher and student make no sense, which is why since the implementation of the Bologna agreements in 2009 they have been discouraged. The rule is very simple: classroom time should be used to do together what students cannot do alone at home. The problem, of course, is that some subjects, and parts of most subjects, need lectures and although we could record and upload them, universities, as I have noted, do not encourage that practice. Teachers, besides, must be physically present in the classroom 45-50 hours for each 6 ECTS subject, which usually consists of 150 hours of work for students. A further key problem is that since the 2008 crisis the trend towards smaller classes in the university, which facilitates dynamic interaction, has been halted. With groups of 50-100 students, many teachers need to use lectures because interaction is hardly possible.
Students’ anonymity increases in big classes, which is why they believe that their absence will not be noted. When 50-80% of the students reach the same conclusion, the classrooms become awkward, half-empty spaces in which teachers completely lose their concentration and motivation (at least this is what I feel). I’ll also mention that whether they last for 50 or for 180 minutes (as it may happen in MA degrees), classes are too long for a generation raised on a diet of frantic YouTube and TikTok videos. Students’ expectations to be constantly amused and entertained by dynamic teachers is another reason for their chronic absence, since we cannot provide that kind of performance (nor should we be asked to do so). They are, plainly, bored.
I must stress, though, that part of the solution is in students’ hands. As a Literature teacher, I do my best to turn my classroom into a space for conversation about the books the students and I should read together. My classes, therefore, can be as dynamic as the students wish, but their boredom has been increasing, hence their absences, because they do not read the books in advance and are visibly reluctant to engage in debate with their peers or myself. A student who has not read the set novels and who does not want to participate in class debate is bound to be awfully bored in my subject, no wonder! The 25-30% who attend my classes regularly may not have read the books (yet) but at least they follow the conversation. I do wish I could make matters more engaging, but with more than 50 students (75 next Spring term) and furniture that cannot be moved around, any attempt at engaging students on my side is bound to fail. I am certainly stressed, and often bored, in 85-minute sessions in which I often hear myself drone on to disinterested students about books they do not care for. I have always wondered what things are like in Medicine.
Less lecturing and more practical interaction appears to be the solution to students’ chronic absenteeism, but this is impossible to implement with their collaboration and in overcrowded classrooms. I used to joke to my students that their class participation mark depended on whether I remembered their name at the end of the semester. Since Covid-19 I have lost the ability to recall their names: first the masks made facial recognition impossible for me, then the groups grew far beyond 45 students (that seems to be my personal maximum), now their many absences make it impossible for me to know who they are. It’s time, then, for a more personalized type of education, in much smaller groups (25 at the most), and with a more practical methodology, to which students contribute with commitment and engagement. All we need, then, is pouring a lot of money into our universities, hiring many more teachers, revamping the classrooms into more flexible spaces so that interaction is improved, and reconsidering the extent of teaching time (both in number of hours per subject and in the extension of lectures). And let’s ask students for suggestions, they might have good ideas we could use.