Has UK university life changed much in the last 20 years?

[moctodtensmum]

When I went to uni to do a BA I had five contact hours a week. The work was light and I was invisible to tutors. I doubt my personal tutor could have picked me out of a line-up despite the fact I eventually came away with a 1st. Life revolved around getting drunk and hanging about with mates. Everything was quite grungy and the university felt underfunded and the students uncared for.

I spent my third year at a US university and it was so very different. Many hours of tutor contact each week, lots of connection with tutors, student life was so much more than getting drunk: it was about sport, community work, societies and studying as well as partying.

All this makes me think I should be saving for my kids to go to university in the US. But maybe UK universities have changed. What is uni life like now?

Btw. No one misses lectures. There was high absence in the first year but as not everything makes it on to Panopto quite a few of those who regularly missed lectures had a bit of a shock with their marks.
I'm old so I go home after lectures but the young ones on my course are active society members. Everything from dance to horse riding. I'm very envious.

not Oxbridge or UCL or similar I assume. This is the difference between students isn’t it? It begs the question as to why these students are on the course and you are obviously hand holding and cajoling them

Actually BubblesBuddy very much similar (top department for the discipline no less) - so your assumption is inaccurate. We don't hand hold, much to their loudly at times expressed dissatisfaction. We push and cajole them towards independence - often against the ignorance of their parents about the nature of university study ...

I went in 1979 and had loads of contact house as I read law. Today my son reading a BA at Bristol has less and his twin reading a BSc at Bristol has more than the BA one. i think it just depends on the subject

It is called "reading" at university rather than studying because you read I suppose, always did and always would.

If you choose MFL at university, including ab initio, you have to work and learn independently.

You can't learn a language "independently" at least not beyond tourist level. Learning a language requires communication and that requires contact with humans. I think a student paying £9000 for 6 hours a week of MFL teaching us getting a very poor deal.

is marking and inwardly digesting, as they say, the content of the face to face teaching the bulk of the learning required, or are students still expected to more than match the contact hours with independent study, as they are here?

@MarchingFrogs They are expected to study independently - the rule of thumb is that they are expected to spend about the same time preparing for tutor group sessions as they spend in the sessions. This work isn't always marked but it can be. On top of this there are marked assignments which are done independently.

Not all students do this of course, but a lot of the ones who don't will either fail or switch to a less demanding course (very high fail/drop out rate in France but IME the students who excel work extraordinarily hard).

chatongris why is there such a high drop out rate in France?

Wow some people hated my last comment t about students being isolated. No that’s not all I took from the many helpful comments on this thread but it was the biggest shock to me as I had no idea some universities allow remote lecture attendance.

Thanks for all the experiences and views shared here. It’s interesting to compare universities over time and across countries.

My children aren’t at the UCAS stage yet so we have a while to decide. I think we might visit some universities in other countries as well as the UK in order to make an informed choice.

They DONT allow students to not attend at all - attendance is compulsory. However if a student is ill, or their bus breaks down or whatever and they can't attend a critical lecture or exam revision session, they can easily catch up with what they've missed. It's a good thing.

The experience you had 20 years ago at an American university was similar to my experience at a British one at the same time, so I'm not sure you can put it down to the country.

@Ginfordinner. The drop out rate is high mainly because universities aren't allowed to select their students at entrance - any student who has the bac, including a non-academic one, can go to any bachelors they like. The students who have been allowed in despite serious problems with either their prerequisites or their motivation then drop out, generally in the first year.

chatongris why is there such a high drop out rate in France?

Lots of reasons. Historically most university courses have not been selective (this is changing now) and in many subjects the brightest students go elsewhere (to the "grandes écoles"). So a big part of the issue is that some students just scraped their baccalaureate and are doing academic courses they are fundamentally not suited to. Students in French state schools are often very poorly advised about HE choices.

But it's also a much more brutal system than in the U.K. Students are expected to work harder here at all levels (my DD had 41 hours of class per week in her last year of high school) - and because uni is basically free, students are not paying customers and no one cares if they fail. Competitive examinations are common in some fields (eg in medicine where there are only enough second year places for about a quarter of the first year cohort) so "failure" is to some extent built into the system. And IME marking schemes are fairly brutal too: there are students in DD's classes who got high passes in their baccalaureate and who take their studies seriously but are getting under 25% in some modules (in her MFL subject, the marking scheme seems to require first year students to have native standard language skills - OK for DD who is trilingual, but very tough for most of the others).

Not suggesting that any of this is "better" (or worse) than the U.K., as the systems are to a large extent not comparable. I have found the discussion interesting and instructive but remain genuinely surprised at how few contact hours British students get for their money.

I think DS had about eight hours a week. Four courses each year. An hours lecture and a hours class for each. It was quite a mathematical economics course so he was expected to spend a couple of hours before each lecture getting familiar with content, and four hours or so after, making sure he was familiar with everything. Add in reading round his subject, the odd voluntary lecture and more, and he was busy. I find it hard to understand how those with huge amounts of contact hours manage to find time for independent study on top.

I also find Bubbles posts on MFL odd. I did not study language at University but have learnt four as a adult. Two hours teaching would be more than enough on top of vocabulary learning, grammar exercises, lab time, reading and the other stuff you do to acquire language. And most is about effort not talent. At least in my case...perhaps because my language talent is so limited.

On the subject of reading versus studying - generally someone would say they were reading the subject not the final degree. So I'm reading Literature at Swotchester, or I'm reading Literature for a BA, rather than I'm reading a BA at Swotchester. Similarly, it is correct to describe the time spent on coursework as studying because not all coursework will involve reading.

DD watches all her lectures online to make revision notes (she does attend all her lectures as well, but often falls asleep during them due to having CFS). Being able to go through them online is a massive help to her.

Gin, DD is similar. She is dyslexic so struggles to write quick notes. She can therefore concentrate in lectures knowing she can rewatch and make notes at her own speed. It makes a huge difference.

DD says that attendance is checked for all lectures and seminars at her university. I believe that students with very low attendance come to the attention of the pastoral team.

At my Scottish uni every first year did three subjects with an hour lecture per day per subject. Science students add an afternoon in the lab once a week and other subjects an hour small group tutorial once a week per subject. The difference between arts and science is that 3hr lab session or I guess two of them if you did two science subjects.
I don’t think that basic format has changed.
Also my uni was very very much about societies (not in a big city).

We have attendance marked for all tutorials (or have to email to explain why not attending) but not for lecturers where you have 300+ students potentially attending.
My tutors say they have no issue me watching them online rather than attending (as it's 1 hour commute) and honestly it'a much easier to make notes when you can pause to write complex stuff down or details of a law case. I watch them the day they are held usually as they are released as soon as lecture is over.

My comments on MFL are not odd. My DD did MFL joint honours and many in her second language course were ab initio. At university level they really don’t have hours and hours of teaching to get up to speed. They have to be hugely self motivated and talented. It’s absolutely not a degree for those who think work is all it takes. That’s a bit like saying you could do a maths degree by working hard. You cannot. You need talent. MFLs at degree level require talent, especially if one is ab initio. Yes, some students struggle. However going abroad tends to level everyone out and of course the culture elements of the course require essay skills and research. Speaking a language is only part of what’s required. Maybe posters should know what is required on a MFL degree before making ill informed comments. It also proves many MFL students have huge talent: to get to degree level ab initio is a fantastic achievement.

burnoutbabe it takes a couple of days for lectures to be available online at DD's university.

From my reading both BubblesBuddy and Needmoresleep are saying the same thing for MFL contact time ie that 2 hours weekly per language is sufficient as there is so much background work even just for the language component.
Chatongris there are a lot of contact hours in the French system which is why French students have a reputation for being most adapted to passive learning.

I have just asked DD about her contact hours and she said that in November it averaged out at about 17 hours a week. Her timetable changes from week to week though. She needs to put in at least as many hours on her own as well. She socialises a lot but hates clubbing, and needs her sleep so isn't really a party animal.

Did a degree last century (to make me feel REALLY old) and I'm doing one now. Can't really compare like for like as one was a BA and absolutely minimal contact hours, and my current one is one of the Allied Health Professions with two days out of the week set aside for placement days so the timetable is ridiculously crammed and we're in 9-5 pretty much the three days a week we're in uni and on placement the other two.

What's changed loads is the support given - the library resources available to us and drop-ins and support sessions are really available if you're at all motivated to chase them up, the disability support is much better as well and I actually think the quality of teaching has gone through the roof compared to what it was when I did my first degree - everything's recorded to watch online as well, and lots and lots of our textbooks are available online for free which saves a small fortune!

Someone else mentioned attendance - we have to swipe in to every session we're timetabled for and it's chased up if we miss a lot without notifying tutors - but it's only really chased up if you're hitting like the 25% level really... like it always was - if you want to doss about and just scrape through you're going to be able to do that to some extent, but if you want to learn and are self-motivated to do that and put the background work in - you're going to be busy.

The standard of coffee shops and on-campus catering has improved massively and there's no way the students of today would tolerate what passed for halls of residence back when I was 18 (Castle in Durham, Moatside Court I'm looking at YOU)

By all accounts I think Castle Leazes at Newcastle can compete with Moatside Court.

The standard of coffee shops and on-campus catering has improved massively

Haha! Yes, and in the surrounding area. In my day, we had the choice of :

• coffee sold in the SU cafe (dire, really dire)
• the stuff in the eatery on the fourth floor, (quite drinkable, once they put in the whizzy new-fangled 'bean to cup' machines, but of course, rather more expensive).
• the cheap and cheerful Italian 'caff' near the main entrance.
• the more upmarket Kardomah round the corner. As a 'slightly older' student, I loved to escape round there with my friend who was a secretary in the Law dept. and it was definitely 'proper' coffee, but of the so strong, even I could just about manage the one cup variey. Even if I had been able to afford another.

Many hours of tutor contact each week, lots of connection with tutors, student life was so much more than getting drunk: it was about sport, community work, societies and studying as well as partying.
....
much more socially acceptable to work hard and want to succeed."

That all sounds much like my UK redbrick science degree (40 years since I started) and my DDs current engineering degree. I don't suppose it was different in between.

Courses and universities vary, but many available in the UK are excellent and fantastic value for money relative to US undergrad degrees.