Except, when you arrive, that smiling person you spoke to at Open Day is nowhere to be seen.
Your classes are taught by someone on a temporary contract, paid less than the cost of a single term’s tuition fees.
And, it turns out, no-one ever actually read your personal statement.
Take a trip behind the scenes with Ben Richards, a man whose desire for a gentle, low-stakes job providing administrative support somehow led to a career as an HE ‘professional’, via a rocky and circuitous route encompassing numerous moments of personal humiliation.
Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is a humorous account of life inside higher education, told by the least-qualified person in the room, who got fed up of wondering why working in a place of learning, surrounded by supposedly clever people, felt like the stupidest job in the world.
Ben Richards is a former university administrator who over the course of nearly 20 years progressed, at a leisurely pace, to a variety of more senior roles with baffling sounding job titles. Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks is his first book.