Susan Bassnett: Why must the students always be the losers?

Two old stories have been back in the news lately: the first is that two-year degrees have been resurrected, with a handful of universities about to engage in pilot schemes.

Po-faced administrators have pontificated about the benefit of shortened degree programmes, suggesting that this will encourage applicants who will only face two years of debts rather than three and will also ensure more efficient use of university premises. No more money is going in to fund these experiments, nor does there seem to be much evidence that student guinea pigs are rushing to sign up for fast-tracking.

My advice to anyone contemplating such a move would be to proceed with maximum caution and find out exactly what quality control measures are in place and who is going to do the teaching. Above all, take with a huge pinch of salt claims that this is an idea designed to widen participation and reach out to the wider community; it looks more like something flung together over a few bottles of wine on a Saturday night, and it's significant that so many universities are not touching this one with a bargepole.

It has also not escaped notice that two-year degree programmes throw the UK wildly out of line with the rest of Europe, and must raise serious credibility questions about quality.

The second story is the hoary old chestnut about how many contact hours students actually require and whether those hours have declined in real terms. The pontificating here is coming from universities higher up the food chain than those who are dipping their toes into the two-year stream. One spokesman actually had the temerity to declare that at his institution half a dozen contact hours a week with beings described as having "world-class minds" were all that any student needed. More than that would apparently be spoon-feeding.

Listening to the tired arguments being put forward on both these issues I am moved to wonder what planet some of my colleagues inhabit. For the brutal reality is that universities are increasingly under-populated by "world-class minds", and staffed instead with squads of graduate students and part-time, temporary lecturers who are all desperately applying for any job that comes over the horizon and might offer better working conditions.

World class minds either flee to countries that treat academics with respect or opt for jobs in the commercial sector and eschew academia altogether. Moreover, the abysmal quality of the A-level syllabus in most subjects means that students have indeed been spoon-fed for years before university, and abandoning them to their own devices is wanton to the point of being almost criminal.

Today's students are as bright as students have always been, but they are casualties of an enfeebled secondary school examination system and boy, do they need more than a few hours contact with their lecturers! They also need time to learn to study independently, and two years is certainly not long enough.

For a fast-track system to be effective, it would need to be really well-resourced and the demands on student achievement increased dramatically. Rabbiting on about how students can be well-served by occasional contact with lecturers ignores the fact that as numbers have increased, so the amount of written work that students are required to produce has declined radically. Those people who fondly remember a world of low staff-student ratios and endless essay writing would be astonished by what goes on today, where in some places students barely write any essays at all, and when they do the word count can be as low as 700 words, the length of this article.

Lecturers do not have the physical time to mark much written work these days. Students really are left to their own devices and the high drop-out rates and rising levels of stress testify to the way the system is failing them.

What depresses me about both these stories is that despite all the rhetoric, students are the losers. Patronising promises of fast- track degrees and world-class tutors should not blind anyone to the chronic underfunding that drives institutions to offer students less while charging them more and more.

The writer is a pro-vice chancellor at the University of Warwick