The clue is in the name

In the last fortnight, three of Britain’s top universities have announced their intentions to charge domestic students the maximum £9,000 per year tuition fee rate from 2012. The culprits here are the usual suspects - Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London: the research titans who all too often tend to set the pace for British academia. The flood of announcements followed closely comments made by Russell Group chairman Professor Michael Arthur - who is also vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds - suggesting that most of the Group’s members would raise fees to the maximum permissible amount.

This is all much as expected. As soon as the £9,000 cap was mooted, the sound of vice-chancellors clamouring to hike degree prices was almost deafening, drowned out only by the chorus of students and widening-access advocates crying foul. Were this at least to be sugarcoated by the prospect of improved teaching hours, perhaps students would be less prone to baulk.

Sadly, this appears unlikely. An NUS survey released this week suggests an alarming drop in contact time between students and their teachers. On average, British students now spend 13.4 hours a week in lectures and tutorials, compared to 14 hours a year ago. Among the Russell Group universities - a title borne with no small pride by all of our aforementioned institutions - the decrease is even larger.

A shift of slightly less than an hour may not seem vastly significant, but in context it is cause for concern. By what rationale does it make sense to increase the cost of a university education while reducing the time academics spend with their students? The argument repeatedly put forward by proponents of the increased fee cap has been that it is an essential measure to preserve the high academic standards of Britain's universities. That logic is undermined at the most basic level by any decrease in teaching time. Students do not shell out thousands of pounds in university fees solely for the pleasure of reading: that luxury carries a far lighter cost. It is the time spent being tutored that make tuition fees a price worth paying.

The message here should be abundantly clear: universities can either slash teaching hours or raise fees. To do both is ludicrous.