Being an Academic in 2026: When Dedication Meets Entitlement

A reflection on the state of international higher education — honest, uncomfortable, necessary.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from overwork, but from caring deeply about something that others treat as a transaction. This past semester brought me to that point. I am writing this not to vent, though perhaps some of this is exactly that, but because I genuinely believe this conversation needs to happen — loudly, openly, and without the usual diplomatic softening that academics perform when they are afraid of sounding unkind.

The System We Are Working Within

International postgraduate students in the UK are navigating a genuinely difficult reality. They arrive carrying the weight of culture shock, financial pressure, and the sheer disorientation of building a life in a foreign country, often without fluency in the local language. They pay exorbitant fees. Many work long hours alongside their studies simply to survive. I do not dismiss any of that. It matters, and it shapes everything.

What concerns me, deeply, is what happens when that reality collides with an intensive block delivery model — six weeks per unit, Assessment 1 in Week 3, Assessment 2 in Week 6 — with no time to find your footing, no space to absorb, no room for genuine learning to take root. New students who are still processing the basics of daily life abroad are simultaneously expected to produce Masters-level academic work on complex, specialised content. The system is not designed in their favour. That is the honest truth.

So some students find comfort and safety within their own cultural communities. That is entirely human. The problem is that, for a number of them, this also means finding shortcuts. Assignments sent to their home countries for 500 rupees. Writing services advertised freely on social media here in the UK for 25 to 50 pounds. Third-party providers delivering generic, templated submissions that have no connection to what was actually taught. On top of this, AI tools being used not as the ethical support aids they are permitted to be, but as a substitute for any engagement with the content at all.

Students enrolled in Global HRM and International Employment Law, as part of an MSc specialisation in International HRM, submitting work that covers neither the global nor the international dimension — just generic HRM content and employment law that bears no relevance to the module. This is despite detailed guidance. Despite classroom time dedicated to showing them exactly how to approach the assessment. Despite going over it again, and again, and again, even after working hours and the weekend.

What I Cannot Reconcile

Here is what I cannot reconcile, and I want to be precise about this because it matters.

Some of these students say they received good feedback before. They say they were doing well. When I hear that, I do not doubt them — but I do have to ask: how is that possible? Because when I invite discussion in class, there is silence. When I probe understanding in a Teams session, I can see they are on their phones, not engaging with the content. Some students, after six months in the UK, still do not have a laptop. Everything is managed on a phone. What is written in class — supervised, agreed, in the room — is not what gets submitted. Companies selected in class for case study work as agreed — not Unilever, not Google, not Amazon, not the names that third-party providers reach for automatically — are replaced by exactly those companies in the final submission.

The pattern is not difficult to see.

So when I ask how they were doing well before, the question I am really asking is: what was being assessed? If a student cannot explain their own work, cannot engage in any academic discussion, cannot demonstrate even basic familiarity with the concepts in a conversation, then what exactly was being evaluated? I have seen this before — not only here in the UK, but in Australia as well, under the semester system. This is not a new crisis. It is a long-running one that the sector has chosen, repeatedly, not to confront.

The Weight of What Comes Next

I dedicated time outside my contracted hours to these students. Not because I was required to, but because I wanted them to succeed. Because I believed that with enough support, enough scaffolding, enough patience, they could meet the standard. The last experience broke something in me, not beyond repair, but enough that I am now sitting with a genuine conundrum.

When students who have been caught are confronted, some cry. Some shout at you. The framing is always the same: the academic is the service provider, the student is the customer, and the customer is always right. Student unions have, on occasion, entered the conversation with the same aggression. The institutional machinery sometimes seems designed to protect the registration number rather than the degree standard.

A Way Ahead

We are now seriously discussing viva voce assessments as a verification tool. Inviting students to explain and defend their own work. It is a reasonable solution. It is also more work — for already stretched academics — and it signals that we have accepted a situation where basic trust between assessor and student has collapsed. It means redesigning assessments, restructuring units, possibly restructuring entire programmes. It means confronting the fact that if everything can be produced by AI or purchased from a third-party provider, then we have to ask a much harder question: what is the purpose of the submitted assignment at all?

Perhaps we move toward in-class live assessments. Class participation that carries marks. Q and A that is graded. Direct demonstration of learning rather than the laundering of learning through text that nobody in the room actually wrote.

The question I am sitting with — and I would genuinely like to know how others are navigating this — is how do we hold the line without destroying the few students who are genuinely trying, genuinely struggling, and genuinely deserve support? How do we continue to give everything to a system that, at its current pace, is rewarding dishonesty and penalising integrity? How much more strength, honestly, are we supposed to have?

I do not have clean answers. But I think the conversation, this one, uncomfortable as it is, is long overdue.

Dr. Lubna Siddiqi is a Senior Lecturer in Business and Management at the University of Bedfordshire Graduate School of Business and founder of Hyacinth Training Consultants. She writes on responsible pedagogy, AI in assessment, and international higher education at lubnasid.com.