£8,000 rise in tuition fees equates to eighteen minutes extra teaching a week.
A recent survey has shown that university teaching hours have barely increased despite a £8,000 increase in tuition fees over the last seven years.
University students are taught for just eighteen minutes more each week, whereas tuition fees have spiralled from £1,000 to up to £9,000 a year in the same period.
The study also revealed that students are spending longer studying on their own, with independent study time up seventy-nine minutes compared with 2006 statistics.
The survey, conducted by Which? consumer group and the Higher Education Policy Institute involved 26,000 undergraduates from 103 universities. A similar poll was conducted in 2006, enabling findings to be compared.
Rachel Wenstone, the National Union of StudentsÔÇÖ Vice President stated that raising tuition fees had encouraged students to ÔÇ£think more like consumers.ÔÇØ She argued that it is not the institutions who are at fault, but the whole system of ÔÇ£sticker price tuition fees,ÔÇØ which sets up ÔÇ£unsavoury ideas about education as a financial transaction rather than a collaborative learning process.ÔÇØ
Between 2006-7 and 2012-13, the income of universities rose from £17.4bn to a projected £23.9bn, but much of the extra income has been spent on improving facilities, rather than increasing scheduled contact time between students and lecturers.
Interestingly, the study noted a huge variation in the hours students are required to work in order to obtain a degree at different universities, revealing undergraduates at some universities study for 20 hours a week, while their peers studying the same degree programme at different institutions study for 40 hours a week.
Georgia Hamer
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