Attitude-Ready Students: Imposters, Myth and Reality
As applications to university continue to fall year on year, much of the focus has been on the dramatic and potentially catastrophic impact on university finances caused by the drop in the number of international student applications. Less often talked about is how this is leaving the sector more reliant than ever on demand from UK 18-year-olds. While 2024 has seen a slight increase in the total number of UK 18-year-old applicants, the application rate – a “key measure of appetite for university” – is down again and still below pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time that prospective students are favouring elite institutions more than ever and with many students using the clearing process to ‘trade up’ we are seeing nearly half of applicants being admitted onto courses with lower grades than published entry requirements. Increasingly then, significant numbers of students are starting off at universities from which they had never expected to get an offer and which, they had previously thought, they were not good enough to get a place.
No wonder that as many as 43% of university students talk about having imposter syndrome - not feeling they deserve their place or belong at university. As one student told us, “I had that voice in my head saying, ‘This isn’t you. You’re not good enough for this’ I was sure I wasn’t as clever as everyone else. I felt as if I wasn’t capable, as if I was dumb, not worthy of my place at uni.”
It’s a feeling that manifests in very different ways. For some students, perfectionism, the fear of making mistakes, compensates for that feeling of not feeling sufficiently qualified; others become workaholic as a way of validating their own worth. Some skip classes for fear of being exposed as a fraud, “afraid of getting it wrong, of looking silly.” There can be self-sabotaging in the face of new opportunities, or always attributing success or failure to external factors or other people, the nature of the course, the university itself. It undermines a student's sense of agency, of self-efficacy, their sense of belonging.
So many students describe to us how they feel “guilty for not being good enough… always comparing myself to the others and they seemed to be doing much better.” In the end, they tell us, “I’d lost sight of why I’d come to university in the first place. I was seriously thinking of leaving.”
Starting off on the right foot
Then there are the myths that need debunking before they trip students up. We know that many students from under-represented backgrounds arrive with very little knowledge or experience of university life, and even less when they end up at a university where they hadn’t anticipated being enrolled. At best they may have read the glossy brochure and taken the digital tour. They will have little sense of the stresses and challenges of student life, of the culture and feel of the institution they are joining. Inevitably, then, there is mis-match between the student experience and prior expectations.
We’ve worked in universities big and small, up and down the county where, for many, particularly non-traditional, students this mismatch can become debilitating, paralysing, demoralising, isolating. As one student told us, “I was desperate to get uni RIGHT, but I wasn’t handling it well. I couldn’t keep up with it.”
Yet these are students with a whole panoply of strengths and assets, of personal qualities and capabilities, all of which have enabled them to not only get to university in the first place, but can enable them to flourish there too. They might have defied the expectations and assumptions arising from their background, overcome challenges by developing a set of skills that more traditional students may not yet have developed.
These are students with a rich range of life experiences and social capital: learning from sporting activities, volunteering, part-time work, caring for family members; digital literacies from a whole range of cultures and sub cultures; complex consumer decision making. They are already confidently navigating complex conversations around who they want to be: their ownership of the climate change agenda; the debates around gender and racial identities; their acknowledgement and ownership of mental health and wellbeing issues. Covid saw them demonstrate an adaptability and resilience greater than previous generations.
So we know that these students have the attributes and capabilities to thrive. But we know, too, that for students likely to be feeling out of place and out of their depth, being attitude-ready is critical starting point for a successful university experience. It’s about a sense of mattering and worth. It’s about having the self-awareness to recognise the parts of themselves that could get in the way of their own success. It’s about being able to build a community that sees beyond the surface and who they really are. It’s about reframing the deficit relationship to mistakes and to support. It’s about taking ownership, the agency to take control of your university experience.
Strategies for tackling imposter syndrome
How then do we tackle imposter syndrome and this mismatch between expectations and reality? How do we have students fully realise their strengths, the assets they bring with them to university?
We have seen how, with the right mix of support, challenge and encouragement students can change the way they think about themselves and they way they think about their university experience. They can come to see that that they already have it in them to make a huge success of their time at university, regardless of the route they took to get there.
The most obvious source of this support, challenge and encouragement is the Personal Tutor (or equivalent) – a potential point of connection, place of certainty and stability from which students can build a sense of belonging, agency and confidence. However, we come across many Personal Tutors who don’t feel confident in supporting students on more than just the academic, unsure about straying into the social and the emotional areas of their lives. It takes a rethinking of the approach to personal tutoring: investing in the relationship with students, and creating the space for students to air their beliefs about university life. It takes working with students to find their own solutions, empowering them, creating agency. For some academic staff, this a real shift in paradigm that will need both support and challenge to achieve.
We might consider how we can support students to be attitude-ready before they fully launch themselves on their university journey, before reality has collided with expectation and they have been thrown off course. We might work on it during the transition to university. We might work on it between offer-day and the start of the academic year. We might work on it before students apply. Whenever we decide, we know that being attitude-ready can make or break the student experience.
Whatever the timing, we have seen in our work just how transformational this can be. As one student said of Grit, “I realised that it was all about me, the way I think about things, the way I talk about myself. Now I’ve got a positive mindset. I realised that, although I can’t change how university is, what I can change is how I am, how I deal with things. Uni is different from how I imagined it, but that’s OK as long as you don’t get stuck on that. I saw that it I had it in my power to get the most out of it.”
Ellie Garraway is CEO and Jon Down is the Director of Development at Grit Breakthrough Programmes. Grit delivers intensive personal development and coaching programmes in universities across the UK.
