University students may be paying over £1,000 per hour for tuition, say researchers.
Some student receive so little contact time with academics that they potentially get just 26 hours of face to face teaching over the course of a three-year degree, which costs over £9,000 per year, according to research published in journal Fiscal Studies.
The amount of teaching time received per student depends largely on the course that they read, which science subjects such as physics involving far more contact time than humanities.
"It seems a bit bizarre," said Dr Mike Peacey, who teaches economics at the New College of the Humanities and authored the report, to the BBC. "It certainly seems like humanities students are subsidising Stem [science, technology, engineering and maths] students.
"Really, students are paying a kind of university tax rather than tuition fees. Maybe that's what you want, but we should be a bit more upfront and honest about this."
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The report was compiled using the Freedom of Information Act and derived from 67 universities up and down the United Kingdom. Alongside Dr Peacey and researchers from the New College of the Humanities in London were colleagues from the University of Bristol.
They compared the 'small group seminar' style of teaching preferred in humanities subjects such as history and politics with the mixture of laboratory, lectures and seminars favoured in science subjects, and used the data to devise a measurement that quantified the amount of individual time received per student.
This measure - total equivalent adjusted contact hours (TEACH) - converts contact time and class size into an equivalent number of hours of one to one contact.
When spread across an average degree of three years, physics students got the most time with academics, 74.6 hours, while history students got less than half that figure with 32.6 hours. Economics students received the least: 26.1 hours on average.
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There were huge discrepancies depending on the standard of the university. Students at more reputable institutions got more contact time, almost five times as much in the top 10 percent as in the bottom 10 percent.
"How much students must pay in tuition fees makes no difference to how much teaching they receive," said the report. "Clearly, some students are receiving much better value for money than others. For a market to function properly, participants must be able to compare what is offered by different providers."
Dr Peacey was clear: "Lots of people have suspected that there are cross-subsidies between subjects. If physics students are receiving much more tuition than history students, it could be that both are paying more than the tuition costs but the physics students are being less ripped off than the history students.
"I think if this measure got taken up and universities were asked to provide this information to students, it might be that different universities might offer differential rates for tuition. Maybe universities offering more contact time would charge more in fees."
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Source: BBC
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