There’s a young woman I know in west London who, having bagged excellent A-levels, chose to study in France. While all her friends, similarly qualified, went off to various redbrick British universities, she picked a fashion school in Paris. To my shame, I must admit I thought it all sounded a bit, you know, Mickey Mouse. How wrong I was.
I also happen to know a few of this woman’s friends, who, naturally, were keen to go and pay her a visit. Never mind Reading, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham, wherever. Paris! With a friend studying fashion! What a ball. But word started to reach me of the disappointments of these jaunts. The problem? “Well,” one of them told me, “she has to leave for college at nine and doesn’t get back until six. She’s there all day. And she has to go in or she gets into trouble. We hardly saw her.”
There was much shaking of heads at what had befallen their friend. A place of learning where you were taught stuff all day, every day? And were failed if you didn’t learn it? And actually had to turn up? They’d heard of such harsh higher education practices in subjects like medicine, but nothing quite like this. And there was more to come when she was home for Christmas. She had so much homework to do she could hardly go out partying, much to the dismay of her friendship group, who were naturally keen to show off the skills they’d learned in their first term.
In the breaks between getting her work projects, our Parisian fashion student managed to do a bit of socialising. From her redbrick mates she heard many tales of sparse timetables and limited contact hours. One of them described her seminars as “a PhD student sitting around getting bored while 10 of us argue for an hour”. At first, she was envious of both their unchallenging workloads and extremely challenging social schedules. But the last time I saw her, she said she was concluding her friends were being short-changed. Her terms add up to nearly 40 weeks a year. Compare this with any UK student’s schedule. No month or more off at Eastertime for her; she gets two weeks, then it’s straight through to early July.
The workload and teaching time, notably in the humanities, have long been a tad on the light side in this country. When I went to university to study English literature in the late 80s, the extent of the teaching was a tutorial, a couple of seminars and a couple of lectures every week. An even older colleague went to Oxford where, he tells me, all he had was one tutorial a week. “My tutor was very clever, to be fair,” he adds. I should bloody hope he was. In my case, I take it I was supposed to fill the many other hours in the day with self-study. Hands up, I didn’t. Mea culpa, but even so, a bit more “Turn up at my seminar, contribute and hand in a decent essay on the subject within 48 hours or you’re out of the door, son” might have focused my mind.
You’d have thought the commercialisation of higher education, with students running up substantial debts to pay for the teaching, would at least drive up standards as the kids demanded more for their dosh. If this is so, word hasn’t reached me via the many students I speak to. I remember one tutor in my first year, in 1986, wryly observing that it was harder to come out of university without a degree than with one. If that was true then, before students were de facto clients, it sounds even truer now.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist