University tuition fees in 2024 are extortionately expensive. You would struggle to find a student who argues otherwise: the maximum fee a student can be charged in this country is £9250 per annum, and unsurprisingly, almost every university – certainly every Russell Group uni – charges exactly that. After all, the majority of them are cash-strapped themselves, due in no small part to declining enrolment figures of international students in the wake of Brexit.
As a result, many universities have laid off staff, frozen wages, scrapped course options, and amalgamated or truncated others. Which, of course, dissuades prospective tutors and academics and students from going to university at all, leading to further financial difficulties for the universities, completing the vicious cycle.
The most likely way the government will attempt to address the problem is by raising the cap on tuition fees to yet more dizzying heights, a measure which could be implemented in Rachel Reeve’s impending budget. In short, UK higher education institutions are in a bad way currently, and it is we the students who will pick up the bill even as the cost of living spirals too.
Everyone in our unfortunate cohort has been royally stitched up to an extent that no other paying “customer” could ever be; domestic students are conned by politicians (whose generation probably paid next to nothing in fees) into thinking they’ve got a good deal because fees are capped – ignoring the fact maintenance loans also haven’t risen with inflation – then get essentially imprisoned whilst paying full rent during Covid. International students are sold by Britain’s glittering but outdated reputation for higher education, get absolutely swindled to balance the books, and are then lampooned for being foreign. But it is humanities students who have been dealt the worst hand of all.
It is the reality that a humanities degree on the whole is less likely to provide higher salary job prospects than a STEM degree. Men who take STEM subjects at A-level and university earn 7.8% more than men who take humanities; for women, this figure rises to a massive 33% according to the Guardian.
This does not make humanities a less worthwhile pursuit, of course – something that seemed to escape ex Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who implied that humanities subjects were the target of his crackdown on “rip-off” degrees – but it does encourage undergraduates to view them as a luxury that increasingly cannot be afforded in the current economic climate. Sheffield University seems to have reached the same conclusion.
As a second year History student, my 10 grand a year buys me just six contact hours in lectures, seminars or labs per week. Result for those of us who diligently reallocate that unregulated time to independent learning (or more likely, the pub), but it amounts to an hourly rate of nearly £60. Except a contact “hour” is only ever timetabled to last 52 minutes, so de facto it’s higher than that.
Second year students of English, Sociology, Psychology and Geography who I asked reported just six, eight, twelve, and seven contact hours per week respectively. For context, STEM degrees normally receive 15-25 contact hours a week. Tutors are underpaid, overworked and stressed thanks to the budget cuts, so there is limited one-to-one academic tuition or dedicated available help unless you specifically apply for it; feedback on assessments can take months; and there is no real room for personal rapport with tutors.
It can sometimes feel that even in smaller seminar environments tutors are restricted to delivering material and resources that are available online anyway, before hurrying off. The interviewed students reported similar, if less severe experiences; one of them said they’d ”expected to spend a lot more time” with their tutors; another asserted that they’d enjoyed a closer relationship with “all my secondary school teachers” than university tutors.
The cuts have also affected the quality of the courses themselves. Some History modules were cancelled this semester, for example, and the department’s absurdly inflexible banding system meant some students who had chosen a cancelled module then had to switch their second option too. So in a semester in which cost us £4125 in tuition, some are being tutored in exactly none of their preferred modules.
Lots of students nowadays are getting less bang for their buck than you’d expect for the sheer amount of buck. Those who study subjects that the corridors of power can get away with marginalising, though, are increasingly becoming victims of daylight robbery.
Image credits: Condé Nast Traveler and Great Basin College
