University Degrees Should be Condensed into 18 Months

The children are coming home. It’s all over. You may see them about the place. In the fridge. Sleeping. Working part-time in the local café if they manage to buck the youth unemployment trends. I’m talking of course about Britain’s university students who are now in the business of trooping home for the year. It’s only mid-May but many universities have shut up shop and their students have a long summer ahead of them before the late September/early October start of a new year. As one irate father, whose son is studying Economics at Edinburgh tells me: “The whole thing is just a money making scam.”

With an average of only 24 teaching weeks a year, 12-14 week long summer breaks, three to four weeks off for Easter and Christmas and extra ‘reading weeks’ thrown in, it could be argued that British universities are less focused on delivering education and more on maintaining their increasingly creaky business model.

For this light timetable, the average student leaves university with £53,000 in student loan debt – roughly £40,000-£45,000 in borrowed amounts plus accrued interest during study. This debt is amongst the highest in the developed world – up to three times higher even than in the US. Even with maximum student and maintenance loans, 86% of parents support their child financially at university with parents paying on average £200 a month and one in 10 over £1,000 a month.

Two of our children are starting higher education this year and I am feeling faint with the prospect of contributing to this “money making scam” and ensnaring our children in debt. Having avoided paying for any education thus far, we are now faced with a four-year science course up north and drama school in London. While we are proud of our sons for having won such appealing places, I cannot pretend not to be aggrieved about the financial outlay that now beckons, particularly if – as I am gathering from various sources – the university experience is dim value for money.

Complaints about the shortness of the terms, the sparseness of the course content and the lack of in-person teaching have come at me thick and fast from the majority of parents of university age children I have spoken to. As one mother explains.

When we went to visit Bristol university, a lecturer gave a speech saying how proud they were that all lectures are online and that if the students couldn’t make them, not to worry, all the information was easily accessible. It was a real point of pride. I thought at the time: well what’s the point of going to university then? And so it has turned out. My daughter, who is studying history, has minimal staff contact, barely attends lectures, has more reading weeks than she knows what to do with, and is coming home next week.

For this, her daughter has taken out a fees and maintenance loan, made up of £9,790 and approximately £5,000 respectively. Her parents are paying the £11,000 accommodations costs which are required even when the university is closed.

The father of the son at Edinburgh explains how his son stopped going to lectures – delivered in halls of 450-500 students – and watches them when he wants, or not at all. While three tutorials were promised a week, these take place online like the bleakest of Zoom calls. Assessment is regular, but again online. Essays are marked by a human. As above, the student has taken out both loans and his parents are paying £1,200 a month for accommodation – plus bills.

Most universities are not shy about stating what they offer: two terms of teaching and then the third summer (I would say spring) term of exams and assessment. Oxford and Cambridge have famously short academic years: three terms of eight weeks, but within those terms a lot is expected of students: for humanities subjects they generally have to write between one and two 2,500 word essays a week. The mother of a daughter who is studying English at Liverpool University says she has written six essays this year: “It’s frankly pathetic.”

Social sciences, humanities and arts subjects (SHAPE) continue to make up the majority of degrees (56%) and are ripest for condensing into shorter courses. Particularly with developments in AI offering accelerated pathways to accessing journals, précising complicated information and supporting the use of referencing, it ought to be up for debate whether these efficiency savings could contribute to shorter, more intense courses.

Practical courses involve more in person teaching contact but even these could be contracted. Leith’s Cookery School manages to deliver its famous culinary diploma in four weeks. A student I know left Chichester College’s one year catering and hospitality course as “weeks were spent cutting up onions”. She now manages a local pub and says she’s learned more on the job than in six months at college.

Condensed university courses have never caught on for the obvious reason that education is – and should be as Aristotle argued – more to do with character formation, civic responsibility and intellectual endeavour than mere narrow academic focus. It’s debateable whether these are taught at current universities, but youngsters commit to further study in order also to escape their family, build their own character, lose their virginity, experiment with heroic amounts of drinking and join sports, music, drama, debating and arts clubs. This holistic approach to education is to be celebrated, but at what cost?

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.