New study which reveals low work-loads in British universities leaves students questioning their degrees
Welcome, freshers, to what might well be one of the universities with the smallest workloads in Europe, according to a recently published study.
The study was conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), which surveyed a variety of universities all over Europe. The results show that the average number of hours invested in a degree by an undergraduate student in the United Kingdom is 25.5 per week, seven hours less than the continental average.
The Netherlands and Germany have an average university workload of 30 hours a week, and French students work for an average 35 hours.
According to the same study, the University of York has a workload of, on average, 21.3 hours a week for subjects such as History and Philosophy and 23.1 hours for Social Science subjects. For the Sciences, such as Biology and Chemistry, the average number of hours is 28 a week, firmly in the middle of the table.
Within our university, the category of subjects with the smallest workload is Creative Art and Design at a weekly 18.5 hours. Computer Science is at the opposite end of the scale, clocking in at 34 hours a week.
However, it is thought that the combination of fewer working hours and the United Kingdom’s reputation as being the second best country in the world for higher education is not enough to lure undergraduates in to the country’s universities.
Bahram Bekhradnia, head of the Institute, who has conducted research on overseas students in England, has found that almost a third do not think their degree is worth the money they are paying for it.
“I worry about how we are going to maintain our international position,” commented Bekhradnia. “It raises questions about what it means to have a degree from an English university, if a degree can apparently be obtained with such very different levels of effort.”
International students from outside the EU often pay three times as much as European students, with international fees around the country averaging at about £10,000 per academic year.
An international student at the University of York will have to pay £9,150 per year for non-laboratory based courses and £12,075 for those which are based in laboratories.
Bekhrandia admits that the number of hours of work put into a degree is by no means proportional to the quality of the degree, but “there is bound to be increasing pressure on English universities to explain how their shorter, less intensive courses match those elsewhere in Europe.”
Universities UK, a higher education action group, warned against using the figures from the HEPI study to make “sweeping conclusions,” claiming that this could only be conterproductive for education.
