#unimythsbusted campaign

​Our guest blog is from the University Alliance who put together the #unimythsbusted campaign. What can we learn from it?

Do you feel anxious about making your university choices? Feel like the decision you make now might affect your future career? Worried about making the ‘wrong’ decision?

You are not alone!

Over the last year or so, we’ve done a lot of listening. To young people, like you, considering university, to parents wondering how best to advise you, and to teachers and careers advisers. We have found that there is a lot of anxiety wrapped up in your decision to go to university – which is, we know, kind of stating the obvious.

All this listening started when we at University Alliance conducted some audience research in 2023. We asked young people aged 16-18, and parents with children within this age bracket, a series of questions to understand their perceptions of university.

We first encountered anxiety about university here: but it wasn’t the anxiety itself that was surprising – it was the specifics of this anxiety.  They were anxious about whether university was really for people like them, whether their emotional and mental wellbeing would be supported at university, whether they were academic enough to even justify going. They were really worried that, later down the line, employers would judge them based on subject choice or institution ranking.

If they couldn’t make the right choice, was there any point in going at all?

In response to this, we’ve launched the #UniMythsBusted campaign in partnership with UCAS, alongside the Sixth Form Colleges Association and UniTasterDays. We thought, if one of the main obstacles facing you on your journey to university is your anxiety, we could definitely lend a comforting hand – with the help of some inspiring advocates.

To make sure we were right about this, we decided to conduct some specific polling - to pinpoint exactly where this anxiety was coming from. We commissioned a poll of 567 university applicants, asking them which parts of their university application journey were making them most anxious.

As it turns out, many of the most anxiety-inducing areas were based on misconceptions – and we could help prove them wrong.
Three main causes for concern emerged so we decided to rename the misconceptions as ‘myths’, so that we could build a campaign around ‘busting’ them. The myths are:

1. University isn’t for people like me
2. I’ll struggle to find a job if I don’t attend the ‘right’ type of university
3. I’ll struggle to find a job if I don’t study the ‘right’ subject

Any of these striking a chord?
Now, who could most usefully bust these myths? Who would be the most believable when saying that the type of university you go to is unlikely to affect your job prospects? Who could say in all honesty that university was for them after all, after thinking the opposite? Some experts?! Yes, but who? We’ve pulled together a crack team of employers, current students and inspirational alumni to run through why these myths are just that: myths.
We’ve done a lot of research to back up the kinds of messages we’re sharing in this campaign. But we’re very open to the fact that we haven’t covered everything. If you feel like we’re missing a really key piece of information, a common misconception or some vital data, please let us know! Interact with our content on Tik Tok and Instagram or contact us via the website.
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Now let’s bust some more myths!