In the great scramble to appear as though they are doing something about tuition fees and student loans which, just week were labelled as potential ‘mis-selling’, the government has announced a new approach to university education.
Universities minister, Jo Johnson, has said that he wants to ‘break the mould’ of a system which has seen traditional three-year degrees dominating higher education. Alongside them he wants to offer what the Department for Education are calling ‘accelerated degrees’. These will charge 20% less than three year courses and, crucially, only run over two years.
Johnson told The Debrief ‘’For too long we have been stuck with a system that has increasingly focused on offering only one way of benefiting from higher education, via the classic three-year degree programme’.
He added that while many students will want to have the three year ‘university experience’ a two-year degree might appeal to what he calls ‘highly motivated students hungry for a faster pace of learning and a quicker route into or back into work’. The plan, if Parliament says yes, is that these new condensed and compressed degrees will be introduced in September 2019.
It all sounds great, in theory. Young people are worried about the amount of debt they will get into over three years, when it costs £9,250 a year to go to university before you’ve even found somewhere to live or worked out how you’re going to afford to eat, who can blame them.
On top of that, just last week very serious and pressing questions were asked about whether universities are providing students with value for their money. The general consensus was, well, no.
Labour are opposed to the move. Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Angela Rayner, has said ‘it seems that every higher education policy from this government comes with another plan to raise tuition fees, with students on part time degrees now facing charges of over £11,000 a year’. She also raised concerns about the workload of university staff.
For some people, the prospect of an ‘accelerated degree’ may appeal, mature students for instance or people looking to change career. Two year degrees will be cheaper overall, but more expensive per year; universities will charge £11,100 per year. First time undergraduates who do opt for a two as opposed to three years will therefore save £5,550 in fees it’s worth asking what they will lose?
University provides a bridge between your youth and adulthood. It is the time in which you practice living away from home and figure out what the hell kind of person you want to be. Find me a person who was the same at the end of the experience as they were when they arrived, with trepidation and a box full of Ikea kitchen-ware at the start.
In the current climate, a three-year degree sounds indulgent. Why should young people be afforded such a luxury? Particularly when hardly any of them can actually afford it (even though older generations got it for free). Can you justify three years of sitting around and thinking when it’s costing you nearly ten grand a year?
Therein lies the rub. As higher education gets more and more expensive, it’s inherent value is questioned. What is the purpose of an expensive degree? When it costs so much it has to open the door into a well-paid job, more well paid than you would otherwise have had, in order to pay dividends.
In seeing university like this, we risk overlooking the true value of a degree. I learned more outside of tutorials and lecture halls than I did in them. I learned about other people, I learned about experiences that were different to my own and I reconfigured myself in relation to them. I learned about how to be beyond my own family and was able to free myself from some of the events and ideas that had defined my life up until that point.
For a state school kid who also happened to be the first person in their family to go to university this was invaluable. I couldn’t put a price on it if you told me my life depended on it (although, the credit card debt I graduated with provides a ball park). Whilst at university, I dared to imagine a life that was different to everything I’d ever known and was encouraged to do so by friends and academics, people I would not have met otherwise.
Fast-paced, compressed, cheap two-year degrees won’t be the choice of students who can afford to think and feel for three-years. They will be taken up by young people who are worried about money and who don’t have families that can financially support them. Who can and can’t afford to take their time will become horribly obvious not just to students but to employers. When conversations about value, not just value for money but intellectually worth, come up will anyone believe that a two-year degree graduate is worth the same as a three-year graduate when sifting through a slush pile of CVs?
Lecturers and tutors will be forced to cram more into their already packed schedules as they attempt to get students through the revolving doors of their institutions faster and ever faster. They won’t have as much time, as much patience or as much energy. My heart sinks at that thought. Nobody taught me how to write, to really write, at school. When I got to university my essays were a mess. One tutor took me to the pub and spent hours helping me fix my prose. Would that happen now? Ten years later? Would I have had the time? Would she?
An ‘accelerate degree’ sounds like something you want in on, like the ‘accelerated maths’ class at school but it’s not the same. It seems to me that there is more to lose than there is to gain from trying to compress the formative experience of university even more. It’s bad enough that one of the side effects of raising tuition fees has been making young people ‘more anxious than ever’, we are now telling them that they should rush through their education so they can start paying off those loans. The government, well intentioned as they may be, are piling even more pressure onto undergraduates by speeding up their education and telling them to be ‘motivated’.
How will students trying to cram three years into two find the time for internships and work experience? When will they go to networking events? Who will they form long-standing, life changing relationships with? How will they learn how to express themselves, where will they find the space and peace to figure out what it is that want to say anyway?
In recent years we've seen a gradual increase of the cost of higher education. We know that graduates aren't earning enough to pay back their debts at the rate the government had expected. What we are seeing now is an attempt by politicians to claw back their loses by encouraging students to opt for a fast food approach to their degree so they can get into work and start paying their debt back more quickly.
Not everything is better because it’s quicker and cheaper. Older generations were afforded the luxury of finding that out for themselves, young people today shouldn't be denied that chance by them because of the bad accounting of various politicians.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.