In 2013, I walked out of high school covered in glory. Second in my year, with multiple scholarships, I was destined for a prestigious architecture school. By 2015, I was in and out of hospital care and completely unable to continue my career. I felt that my university did not want to know. To sign my dropout papers, I had to go through campus suicide rings, a futile attempt to mitigate their students’ mental health crisis.
I resigned myself to a life of swinging between minimum-wage jobs that destroyed what was left of my health and state benefits that stopped the moment some distant bureaucrat decreed that I was able to buy a loaf of bread and therefore eligible. to work.
At first I told myself that I could do a quick therapy and re-burn the candle at both ends, but I soon realized that what I needed to stay alive was fundamentally incompatible with architecture’s exhaustion culture. He had £24,000 in student debt and nothing but illness to prove it.
My story may seem like an extreme case, but I am by no means an outlier. This years AJ Student Survey Revealed that 45 per cent of UK respondents were in treatment or had previously sought help for mental health problems related to their education, and a further 22 per cent said they might need help in the future. So it’s no wonder that 17 percent of those who intend to become qualified architects at the beginning of their education are no longer sure at the end of it. This number it’s even higher (23 percent) among female students, and it’s likely to be higher for groups held back by our industry’s well-documented privilege of white men. These numbers also cannot account for those who have left the industry altogether.
The survey also reveals that 43 percent of full-time students work 15 or more hours per week to finance their heady lifestyle of late-night modeling sessions and group breakouts around the printer on the critical day. The costs related to the course amount to £2,198 on average each year.
The results also indicate that a higher percentage of BAME students have to work.
I was lucky that my parents supplemented the misery of my child support loan and I still had to work. How many people are financially excluded from architectural education in total?
So what do we survivors of Part 1 have to show for our efforts? On average, a whopping £74,580 of student debt at the end of our three years, assuming we clear everything on our first try.
When I first met my partner, they assumed that we would soon be living the high life on my architect salary and they might finally cut some of their overtime shifts. Unfortunately, they and many other non-architects in my life are shocked to learn that I won’t earn much more than a full-time minimum wage employee, and I still have another five years of training to go before I can even call myself an architect. .
According to the RIBA, graduate salaries are stagnating, despite skyrocketing costs of living. All of this makes architectural education seem less like an investment and more like a passion project, or worse, a responsibility.
The good news is that my story seems to have a happy ending: I have returned to architecture school, and at this new school, I am on track to graduate with a 2:1 in the summer of 2023. Better yet, the support of my specialist faculty and mentor means it has not been at the expense of my health.
My return was made possible by my school’s part-time option and living with my parents almost rent-free. Good fortune has allowed me to live up to my academic potential, no doubt aided by my white privilege and middle-class upbringing.
How many other struggling students don’t have that prospect of a hopeful future?
Rebecca Hurford is a Part 1 student at Leeds Beckett University
