Suicide students

So now Cambridge tops the UK University Guide, beating Oxford (haha, time they got pushed aside!). According to the guide, third in the list is Imperial London, followed by the LSE and then Prince William’s old place, St Andrew’s.

None of it really matters as it is all subjective anyway and it depends, particularly, on what course you want to do. Happily this Guide seems to recognize this and it allows you to weight the significance you put on factors that are important to you such as student satisfaction, entry standards or the ratio between staff and students.

Quite right too. Mere academic achievement is only a part of it, as I discussed with the student who has started an internship with Moneymagpie.com today. Andy, who is doing Social and Political Sciences at Magdelene College, Cambridge turned up for work here this morning. Notwithstanding his inability to cope with the intercom system (well, pressing a buzzer can be tricky) he is a bright and friendly chap with an easy approach to life.

I told him that when I was at Cambridge Magdelene was pretty low down, possibly even bottom, of the internal academic league table. He said they are still happily ensconced round about there. However, my college, Christ’s, which, when I was there was pretty much middling at everything, is now top or near the top of the table and has been for a few years now. I had suspected as much from the (intensely dull) college magazine we alumni get once a year.

The stupid thing is, though, that because of this level of academic achievement in the college, Christ’s now has a high suicide rate. In fact, Andy tells me that in the weeks running up to, and during, exams, the porters have a ‘suicide watch’ where they wander round the corridors at all hours, checking that students aren’t throwing themselves out of windows.

At Gonville and Caius college which has similar standards, students even have to justify their exam results in front of a board, particularly if they have done badly. Not surprisingly, they have a suicide watch too, according to Andy.

It’s crazy. As if life weren’t pressurized enough for students right now, particularly Oxbridge students who, I know, tend to set themselves all sorts of impossible targets to achieve. Not only are students facing huge debts and a much tougher economic regime once they graduate than when I was a student (honestly I didn’t know I was born), but now they have these extra pressures from the tutors.

I think it’s time today’s students got some of that 60’s spirit of militancy. They’ve got the internet so they can organize on a national or even global scale. I don’t know why they don’t. Maybe I’ll suggest it when I do my student finances special in September on Moneymagpie. 

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