The Browne review into the funding of higher education has led to a debate on whether a university education provides value for money. In the last three months, there have been two comment pieces by arts students complaining about the "paucity of teaching" within their degrees and suggesting that the disparity between arts and science contact hours should be reflected in the fees.
I'm entering my third year of a chemistry degree at the University of Manchester and I would not be surprised if, as a result of the Browne review, science undergraduates are asked to pay considerably higher fees without any real debate about whether they actually get more value for money than arts students.
Last year, my fees "bought" between 15 and 20 contact hours a week. Eight hours of lectures, nine of labs, along with regular tutorials and workshops. I got the chemicals I needed to run my experiments, the support I needed to do them safely and the journal subscriptions necessary to place my experiments in context. So far so good.
And what experiments did I do? The same standard set of experiments that were performed last year and will be performed next year. That's not a complaint; learning the basic techniques is an essential part of any science degree. But it does preclude original thinking; all my assessments to date have involved "right" answers that can be logically deduced from the available knowledge.
By comparison arts students, if they are lucky, get six to eight hours of lectures, seminars and tutorials a week. Instead of labs and workshops, they get extensive reading lists: they are "paying for the privilege of reading textbooks". So for three years and almost £10,000 in tuition fees, what do they really get?
Well, for one thing, they get a sounding board for their ideas. Once arts students have worked through their reading list, they're going to have ideas about what they've read and how these ideas fit into the grand scheme of things. At university, they get access to a knowledgeable faculty and, through discussions, can clarify and better express their ideas.
Their fees also pay for the supply and maintenance of the huge collection of books necessary to develop the required depth of knowledge – otherwise known as the library. It's a telling fact that at the main University of Manchester library, there is part of one floor devoted to science and nearly five wings devoted to the arts.
Another, more abstract, way of looking at value for money is by examining the skills learned through a degree. Again, arts students apparently don't get value for money. What do they learn? How to read a book? How to analyse a theme? Compare that to a science student who has potentially learned the basics of probing the nature of the universe.
Yet the majority of graduate entry jobs simply require a degree, irrelevant of specialisation, so there must be something valuable about an arts degree. All students are essentially taught the same skills; the ability to work self-sufficiently, a toolkit of problem-solving methods and the skills and confidence to apply it in unknown situations.
The more you put in to your degree the more you get out. Those who take the time to seek out lecturers and use all the resources their fees pay for get far higher value for money than those who simply cruise through. Also, whether you're studying 10th-century Norse poetry or the stereochemistry of heterocyclic molecules, degree-level study requires a stupendous amount of work to reach the standard required.
Arts and science degrees are different but equal, and equally valuable. So please, stop demonising science students because we spend more time in labs and less time in the library.