Geraldine Van Bueren says international law could help opponents of rising tuition costs in their battle. The argument that economic pressures do not oblige those in power to increase tuition fees fell on deaf ears when legislation was passing through Parliament several years ago. Opponents of £9,000 fees have an opportunity to revive it, however, using international law - and the government may find it more difficult to ignore their case if it is focused through this lens. What does international law tell us about setting tuition fees? First, that it is not true that British governments are free to set the level of university fees constrained only by the market. Read more...

By Natalie Cox. The news some students get fewer than 100 teaching hours a year isn't all bad – the free time is a learning experience in itself. I'd wager that few recent graduates were shocked at the news of just how many UK students receive fewer than 100 hours of teaching per year. In fact, I'll bet you three dodgy draft beers and an ill-advised kebab that the first memory to emerge from the fog is not your hand fusing into a claw from the scrawling down of illegible notes, because the truth is that very few of your university years are spent at university. The only lecture that I can recall from my university days involved a geriatric thespian spending so long musing over the answer to a student's question that we worried he'd expired on the podium.
It's easy to measure the value for money of university courses based on contact time: why should a student of medicine, whose timetable is full from dawn till dusk with specialised teaching and a free cadaver thrown in, be charged the same as an English literature student who only spends 12% of their university year being taught face to face? The rest of the time, according to the government website Unistats, is spent in "independent study", which everyone knows is code for doodling in the margins of your lecture notes in the library as you wait for the instant coffee shakes to abate, or escaping into the real world and doing stuff that is entirely unrelated to your course, but life-enhancing nonetheless. Read more...