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Higher education

Talk to other parents whose children are preparing for university on our Higher Education forum.

If we're so intent on shortening degrees, why bother with the lectures at all? Just put a price tag on the parchment and be done with it.

108 replies

User11010866 · 29/03/2026 07:24

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/university-three-years-student-loans-opinion-5HjdWx2_2/

Having just read this article, it seems to highlight a worrying trend in UK Higher Education. Compared to other global leaders, the UK already has the shortest academic years and the lowest contact hours. One has to wonder how our new graduates are expected to remain competitive on the international stage.

Why are most university degrees still three years long? If we want to fix student finances, the academic calendar needs a rethink | LBC

As MPs launch an inquiry into student loans in England, it’s clear that the debate around how undergraduate degrees are funded shows no sign of slowing down.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/university-three-years-student-loans-opinion-5HjdWx2_2/

OP posts:
Walkaround · 02/04/2026 07:51

Poppiesmocking · 02/04/2026 00:01

I never suggested you should not read widely. I am talking about PP saying the entire point of a degree is to be able to read and respond to an essay prompt. Of course a barrister must be able to interpret individual cases but they must also have knowledge of how the law works, what are the main relevant Acts, Regulations and Statutory Instruments for their area of law, significant case law etc. There is a reason barristers specialise in different areas and that is because knowledge is important, not just skills.

Even in humanities, asking students to constantly reinvent the wheel is a waste of their time.

You are just inventing what someone else said, it’s not what they actually said - unless you actually, genuinely and not facetiously believe the essays and reading lists were not designed to direct the reader towards information from which they were required to gain the necessary knowledge. I’m not sure how you expected the person to pass any exams if the questions were meaningless to them and they had no knowledge to back up their arguments. My law degree was very largely based on being directed to reading and writing essays, to be discussed in tutorials - same point. Lectures were optional. This was at Oxford - an excellent training ground for future barristers and people,interested in the humanities.

Walkaround · 02/04/2026 08:28

And reading everything mathanxiety wrote, I don’t believe for a minute she didn’t think acquisition of knowledge was part of what happened when she was reading, digesting what she read and gathering evidence for her essays.

Poppiesmocking · 02/04/2026 08:36

Walkaround · 02/04/2026 07:51

You are just inventing what someone else said, it’s not what they actually said - unless you actually, genuinely and not facetiously believe the essays and reading lists were not designed to direct the reader towards information from which they were required to gain the necessary knowledge. I’m not sure how you expected the person to pass any exams if the questions were meaningless to them and they had no knowledge to back up their arguments. My law degree was very largely based on being directed to reading and writing essays, to be discussed in tutorials - same point. Lectures were optional. This was at Oxford - an excellent training ground for future barristers and people,interested in the humanities.

Edited

Your Oxford degree obviously didn’t help your reading as I literally quoted the pp:

The entire point of my degree was to read, digest what I read, and make a coherent, evidenced argument in response to the essay prompt.”

Walkaround · 02/04/2026 11:58

Poppiesmocking · 02/04/2026 08:36

Your Oxford degree obviously didn’t help your reading as I literally quoted the pp:

The entire point of my degree was to read, digest what I read, and make a coherent, evidenced argument in response to the essay prompt.”

You literallly quoted part of what she wrote and then chose to ignore what it means to digest what you read and how you can possibly write a coherent, evidenced argument if you have no knowledge.

Walkaround · 02/04/2026 12:28

And if someone uses AI to write their essays for them and write lecture notes for them, in order to avoid the effort and time involved in doing their own reading and listening and taking their own notes, they are acquiring neither knowledge nor skills.

Walkaround · 02/04/2026 15:04

We are as a society sleepwalking into bringing children up to be incapable of concentrating for long enough to absorb complex and frequently conflicting information in order to analyse it for themselves. Instead, we are expected to be delighted that LLM AI is supposedly doing that for us - except to check that it is doing that properly and truthfully, we need to have done the work ourselves and then correct AI’s mistakes and hallucinations, which is quite frankly a ridiculous waste of our time, as that way we lose skills we should be developing or retaining (reading, writing and thinking for ourselves with an authentic voice) and don’t even develop our own knowledge, because we haven’t really done the work, we’ve outsourced it to a glorified spellchecker that neither knows nor cares what it writes or what it means, it just puts strings of words together in the way most likely to appear to make sense and look good on the surface. If you are lazy enough to use that, you are lazy enough not to check anything properly, provided there is nothing obviously wrong. And if you are overworked enough to need to do that and hope to get away with it, then AI hasn’t helped you, it’s just storing up trouble for when people belatedly realise how much harmful rubbish has been enmeshed into everything we do and rely on. Like Chinese whispers, the longer we rely on AI to invent bilge for us, the worse our problems will become, because more and more absolute crap will have crept its way into the mainstream and been accepted as truth, not invention.

fairyring25 · 02/04/2026 20:23

@SpringLambton
I feel for you. It is such a waste of money to be paying for university accommodation that isn't needed.
6 months without any tuition seem ridiculous to me.
The Open University does a fantastic job with their distance-learning materials. Perhaps other universities could offer something similar for the 6 months of the year that there is no tuition so students can graduate in 2 years rather than 3 lots of 6/7 months.

MeetMeOnTheCorner · 04/04/2026 09:49

@SpringLambton So why did she choose a university course? Why not choose a cheaper city? We have hugely widened participation but there’s a cost. Lots of accommodation has been built and it’s expensive to rent. Lots more go to university but they pay a price. Her loan payments are based on her earnings. Get a great job and she’s benefitted from the degree. If she’s working and studying, use some of her savings to take out a lower loan if it bothers you.

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