With almost half of England’s universities now committed to charging the maximum £9000 per year in tuition fees, and most of the remaining universities setting headline fees that are close to the £9000 limit, questions inevitably arise in the minds of prospective students, their parents and others including perhaps those in universities themselves, as to what might be the implications of these fee rises and whether UK higher education will still be perceived as offering in some sense ‘value for money’.
Among the interesting issues raised by the increase in tuition fees are those concerning the relative costs of teaching different academic subjects in UK universities. For example, subjects such as the humanities, including for example, English, history, philosophy and such like, are typically thought to be relatively cheap to teach. Many students will have less than 10 ‘contact hours’ in lectures and seminars each week, and will study independently for much of their time making use of relatively inexpensive resources such as library books and on-line academic journals etc.
Conversely, many subjects in the sciences such as chemistry and physics require many hours to be spent in highly expensive laboratories, undertaking experiments under the guidance and supervision of university staff, and using often extremely expensive equipment and resources such as chemicals. And yet, from 2012, the £9000 in tuition fees that will be paid by students may well be exactly the same at any given institution whether the student is studying, say, chemistry or history. » Read more: Is UK Higher Education A Good Value?
