By Ruby Hargreaves, Deputy Comment Editor
Amidst struggling with my workload and looking to tutors for advice (or admittedly, sometimes just to complain about the aches of language study), I have always been dealt the same response: ‘treat your degree like a 9 to 5’. But, this clumsy conflation of academia and employment has always sounded tone-deaf to me, because academia does not exist in place of work for so many of us at university. In fact, for the least privileged, it requires it.
Visions of student life seem stuck in the days when university was reserved for an elite. Certain that their parents could fork out their cost of living, regardless of what the city’s job market looked like or what their maintenance grant prospects were, these students rarely had to weigh up the pros and cons of heading straight to work or continuing their education beyond school. Their path was paved if they wanted it to be. Nowadays, more students and broader demographics are flocking to university, and the support to get talented, deserving students there is consequently being spread thinner.
Student-paid tuition fees were introduced to the UK in 1998. Starting out means-tested, these fees would become indiscriminate and even increase with time, which coupled with the growing withdrawal of government financial support, has left many feeling outpriced of higher education. The deferring of this expense until after the end of the degree course offers little consolation when the removal and harsh reduction of bursaries from many institutions (the University of York dropping their first-year bursary allocation from £2000 to £1000 per year in 2025) has made lifestyle expenses unaffordable without a job to get in the way of the very study that you’re working to be able to pay for in the first place – making both work and study feel redundant, tedious, and counteractive.
As a student in receipt of the maximum maintenance loan and a bursary, and one of the many to endure the year-long sentence in Metal Works (£9713.76 of rent per year) with no choice in the matter, I remember looking around and wondering how my friends who didn’t receive such generous support were affording to live on top of rent. I knew of many who, assigned such expensive student accommodation, had to seek private accommodation because their rent would otherwise have amounted to more than what the government loaned to them. For many, funding that extra few thousand pounds was so impossible they abandoned student halls altogether – a salient part of the Bristol social setting in first year. And, the expectation of such financial output just does not align with the hours our degree should theoretically exact from our lives.
At Bristol, 120 credits per year are required for most courses to pass. The University also suggests that each credit corresponds to 10 notional hours of study. That’s 1200 hours per year. With typically 30 academic weeks per year, that adds up to around 40 hours of learning per week – more than the standard number of hours for most full-time work. As much as our degrees are supposed to be labours of love, there is a fine line between diligence and devotion. Even if you are devoted enough to commit to such a number of hours on top of your job, what if these numbers increased and made it impossible?
The hours required to be a full-time student have, in fact, increased. Nonsensically, as the cost of living, particularly in student cities such as Bristol, has done the same. Flexibility is valued by struggling students, but is failing to be honoured by the very institutions we pay to take us under their wing.
Aside from the numbers, what about the differences in the university experience of those who have to work compared to those that don't? The reduced sense of community from not having time to attend socials, or the evenings spent behind a till, instead of completing valuable pre-reading that will make tomorrow’s seminars actually worth attending.
Time poverty is real. Discretionary time is essential to our wellbeing. But, we live in a time when choosing to work alongside university can often no longer be considered a choice. Even changing our language to account for the pressing necessity of work at university can be a step towards changing the dynamics between working and non-working students.
Clair Vickery conceptualised the term ‘time poverty’ in 1977, and it massively considers the psychological, as well as temporal factors of prioritising money over time. When a person’s priorities are set by their circumstances as opposed to being a conscious choice, they don't just lose time, but a sense of control over their own life. And, that’s huge.
Alice Benjamin
Government financial support and university course expectations need to be looked at side by side so that as the former lessens, so does the latter. Or, if we don’t want the quality of our higher education system to suffer, then the pennies need to match the pages of pre-reading before students have to start moving towards full-time work over their hard-earned ‘full-time’ education.
Featured image: Unsplash / Marvin Meyer
Is there such thing as a full-time student anymore?
