By Helen Kirby-Hawkins
As semester two gets underway and universities settle back into a familiar rhythm, conversations about attendance and engagement quickly resurface. Students’ attendance may waver, triggering interventions from well-meaning staff. Engagement meetings fill with questions as institutions try to interpret the why. Are students less motivated. Why are they choosing not to attend. Is hybrid teaching to blame. Are students relying on AI instead of coming to class. Is the lecture dead. Is the time, location or room wrong. Is the teaching engaging enough.
On the surface, these questions seem reasonable. Universities should create learning environments that are coherent, predictable and conducive to learning. Facilities, pedagogy and timetable design matter. But the underlying issue is that these questions flatten the complexity of engagement into a binary: you’re either engaged or you’re not. They imply a personal deficit. a problem for universities to “fix”. And they obscure what research and practice repeatedly show: students are not disengaged, they are overloaded.
Understanding engagement in 2026 requires a different starting point. It requires professional curiosity, the willingness to look beyond behaviour, resist deficit framings, and ask what sits beneath the surface of the data. It requires us to understand lifeload, and how it shapes the identities students inhabit as they move through their week. Professional curiosity allows us to move away from preconceived ideas of what “good engagement” looks like, often reduced to a data point, and towards a more nuanced, human understanding of authentic engagement, which rarely fits neatly into our systems and processes.
Students are not a homogeneous group, and they haven’t been for a long time. They arrive with different needs, responsibilities and identities. Many do not disclose these, and institutions often do not ask the right questions or provide infrastructures that allow all students to integrate seamlessly into university life.
Recent reporting has again highlighted the experiences of commuter students, living at home with family, students who choose long journeys, rising travel costs and fragmented days to alleviate the financial pressures of university accommodation. Other insights show that commuters want more flexible accommodation models and rest spaces. These stories shine a spotlight on what many students have been navigating for years: the invisible lifeload of managing everything, often within systems not designed for the modern student.
What lifeload really is
Lifeload refers to “all the things happening or not happening to you in your life at the moment” (Lau 2018). In the engagement literature, it is described as “the sum of all the pressures a student has in their life, including university” (Kahu 2013:767). It is not the same as workload. Workload is the list of tasks. Lifeload is the weight of living while doing those tasks.
Across the literature, lifeload emerges through four interlocking pressures, a pattern echoed in research on cognitive load (Sweller 1988; Paas & van Merriënboer 1994) and in studies exploring how fragmented time and competing demands erode students’ ability to participate meaningfully (Nilsson et al. 2022; Sun et al. 2023).
The first is cognitive drag: the mental effort of constantly checking, refreshing, re-planning and monitoring. When students spend their days recalibrating plans or piecing together scattered information, their attention is already exhausted before they reach the classroom.
The second is emotional vigilance: the anticipatory stress that accompanies instability. Kahu (2013) highlights the emotional dimension of engagement, and Reeve & Tseng (2011) show how depleted emotional resources reduce students’ ability to act agentically. Students may experience emotional vigilance across multiple identities, which can dilute their capacity to inhabit the student identity.
The third is logistical friction: the practical burdens of travel, childcare, work shifts, timetable gaps and unpredictable scheduling. My recent study found that logistical friction is not an inconvenience; it is a structural determinant of attendance. When a timetable change requires rearranging childcare or renegotiating work shifts, attendance becomes a negotiation between identities, not a matter of choice.
Finally, temporal fragmentation erodes the conditions for learning. Days broken into unusable slivers prevent deep engagement, focus and continuity. Constant context-shifting and inadequate rest breaks disrupt students’ ability to learn, reflect and belong.
When lifeload is high, students’ capacity to meaningfully engage collapses, not because they lack motivation, but because they are already at their limits. Worryingly, institutions may miss this, as students may still be physically attending while mentally being checked out.
Identity and lifeload: the missing link
In data-driven work, it is easy to adopt a reductionist view of students, diminishing them to units of data or objects within a system. But one of the most powerful insights from my study was the need to adopt a more humanistic view, one that recognises the intersectionality and fluidity of students’ identities.
Identity theory helps us understand this. Identity is not fixed; it is continually negotiated, a dynamic interplay of similarity and difference (Jenkins 2008). The APA Dictionary of Psychology (2023) similarly frames identity as the blend of personal characteristics and social roles that shape how people see themselves.
The students in the study lived this. Very few saw “student” as their primary identity. Instead, they moved between roles that felt more permanent or more urgent: worker, parent, carer, commuter, partner, community member. This aligns with Kahu’s (2013) socio-cultural model, which positions engagement as emerging from the interaction between personal circumstances, identity and institutional context.
In moments of decision-making, these identities carried more weight than the student identity. This is not a failure of commitment; it sadly reflects reality. When lifeload rises, the psychological and practical resources needed to inhabit the student identity shrink. Students switch into identities that help them cope, survive or protect what matters most. The “student identity” does not disappear — it simply becomes the one they can least afford to inhabit.
For decades, university learning operated on an appointment-viewing model: teaching had temporal fixity, and students organised their lives around a specific slot because the content only existed at that moment. Today, learning is on demand, with recordings, catch-up and accelerated playback allowing students to engage at a time that fits their week. Yet many of the identity’s students hold: worker, parent, carer, commuter, still operate on fixed, appointment-based schedules with far less flexibility. When those identities retain temporal fixity and university learning does not, students naturally prioritise the identities with the least room to move.
This may look like a student who does not attend a timetabled session because another identity such as parent, worker, carer has a time-sensitive claim on them. They may instead fully inhabit the student identity at 9pm, watching the recorded lecture and making notes.
Institutions have given students digital tools that enable more agentic engagement, yet we continue to rely on rigid timetables and physical attendance triggers that sit at odds with how modern students occupy the student identity.
Think of a student physically present in the room but fast asleep after a night shift, or someone scrolling on their phone because they are cognitively elsewhere, checking emails about financial support, train times or childcare arrangements. Physical presence is not the same as cognitive engagement, and by semester two the cumulative impact of lifeload becomes increasingly visible.
Melissa: a lifeload case study
Melissa, one of the composite characters in my paper illustrates this with painful clarity. She is a mother, works part-time, commutes from outside the city and lives in her own home with her partner and daughter. She speaks openly about the dissonance she feels between her reality and the traditional undergraduate student identity- an identity she envies but does not recognise herself in.
Her identity as a mother is primary. University fits around her family life, not the other way around. Melissa describes feeling as though she is doing “a lot of things not so well,” and how she underestimated the additional burden university would add to her already full life. She is naming her lifeload, the weight of doing all the things she must do.
She also speaks about finding a group of students in similar circumstances, and how this sense of belonging validates her version of the student identity. She finds others like her and in doing so, finds a place she belongs.
Why lifeload must reshape our approach to engagement
The engagement literature has long recognised that engagement is multi-dimensional: affective, behavioural and cognitive. My findings shows that these dimensions are continually mediated by lifeload: the cognitive, emotional and logistical pressures students carry before they even reach the classroom.
Students engage when they have the capacity to inhabit the student identity. When lifeload spikes, other identities take precedence. Students’ decisions are shaped by cost-of-living pressures, work patterns, caring responsibilities and travel logistics. And crucially, disengagement is not a choice. It is a survival response to systems that demand more than students can carry.
If we want engagement that is meaningful rather than performative, we must start with identity, with who students are, who they are required to be, and who they can realistically be within the constraints of their week. Engagement is not a behaviour to monitor but a human state, shaped by lifeload, belonging, stability and the ability to show up as a student without compromising other identities that matter.
This requires professional curiosity and looking beyond the dashboard, asking better questions, and attending to the lived realities behind the data. It means designing environments that honour the complexity of students’ lives, reduce unnecessary pressure, and create the conditions in which the student identity can be safely and sustainably inhabited.
Because when we understand identity, when we take students’ lifeload seriously, and when we treat engagement as a human experience rather than a metric to increase, something shifts. Engagement stops being s metric to measure but a human experience, something to explore and is a story of student identities in motion.
Read my full paper here: Riding the carousel
About the Author
Helen Kirby-Hawkins is the Assistant Director in Education Services at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work focuses on the intersection of operations research, student engagement, and behavioral science. She specialises in timetabling, habit formation, student lifeload and safeguarding, with a commitment to embedding human-centric approaches into institutional policy and practice.
References
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Kirby-Hawkins, H. (2024). Riding the Carousel: Understanding student identity, lifeload and engagement in higher education. Student Engagement in Higher Education Journal, 6(1). Available at: https://sehej.raise-network.com/raise/article/view/1205/852
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