Students, courses, faculty members, authority figures and everyone else connected to an institution must work together on some level if the university as a whole is to succeed. However, since students should be the focus of any good university, how do you know for sure that the place you are about to pack your bags and leave for is one of those places? Here we take a look at what you should be focusing on when you make your decision.
The Importance of University Attitude Towards Students
Unless a university actually cares about its students, there is no possible way that the young minds will be able to achieve the excellence they are capable of. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult these days to find such a place, even in a culturally and academically rich nation like the United Kingdom.
Difficult is not the same as impossible though, and we have a few pointers to help young students find colleges that actually care about their students’ careers, health and happiness.
Compare Your Options
Use your time at home to find out what your options are exactly, and then compare them with each other until you find the perfect college for your own career aspirations and taste. Uni Compare is the perfect place to find recommended universities and also to compare the top listed colleges with each other, until you find your winner. For example, via Uni Compare you can get to know Roehampton University and what it has to offer to its students. This recommendation is pretty solid as the University of Roehampton ranking is pretty high (top 25%) in all of the UK.
Even if we set aside the University of Roehampton ranking and position on the list of top UK universities, a simple visit to the website will give you an idea regarding why ex-students agree that the university actually cares for its students. A lush green campus, shimmering ponds, top-notch safety standards and a very healthy community development programme inside the campus all make it a good option to consider.
Check the Placement Records
If your university cares about how your career will turn out to be after you are done there, they should have a reliable record of good placements. For example, engineering students should be looking for a university that has good connections with a number of relevant companies that hire engineers from the branches they teach. Ideally, the companies should also have a good reputation in the market as employers too. As an added precaution, you may also want to check how long the average employee retention period is for those employers.
Accreditations
Accreditations are not really a sign that a university cares about the students, because it should be the basic criterion based on which a student should be filtering out his/her options. However, given how many unaccredited courses are available these days, you may want to be particularly careful, especially before joining an online program.
Online programs are great for professionals who need the extra time and flexibility to also hold a job, but unless the course is accredited, both their effort and money will be wasted, since it will not be held as valid. Be it an online or an offline establishment, if your university doesn’t have the necessary accreditations, rest assured that they certainly do not care about their students’ careers!
Updated Courses
If you visit some developing nations, you will notice that even their physicians who were trained decades ago did not keep themselves updated with everything that has developed over the decades in medical science! The same is not allowed in the UK, as physicians have to take exams and keep their qualifications valid and updated with time. Unfortunately, that’s not mandatory in all fields even here.
If a university truly cares about its students, it will keep on updating its courses with time, irrespective of whether it is mandatory or not. There is no point in trying to meet the challenges of this digital world we all live in, with outdated education from twenty years ago. You will have too much to catch up on, and it will hamper your prospects, pay and rate of growth.
Finally, use the internet to its full extent and reach out to online forums and see what ex-students are saying about the college and their faculty. You may also want to check out where they stand in their careers right now as well because minimum wage workers praising a college is not something that proves the college really cares! Nevertheless, if people are mostly positive about the faculty members and the kind of experiences they had during their time at the university, it’s certainly a sign that the establishment cared enough to leave that positive impression.