Students in England are going to be offered degrees in two years with a £5,500 (~€6,240) saving in tuition fees, says the universities minister Jo Johnson.
The new two-year degree means undergraduate courses will be condensed into “accelerated” degrees.
Johnson said he wants to “break the mould” of a system in which three-year degrees have “crowned out” any more flexible ways of studying.
Under the new two-year degree, students would take the same number of units and have the same amount of teaching and supervision, but degree courses would be delivered in one less year.
The Office for Fair Access says the plan could help to widen opportunities.
However, Labour’s shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, said there was no evidence that “squeezing three years of learning into two will stop the huge drop in part-time students or lead to better outcomes”.
Instead, she said that in effect it would mean that for each of the two years of study, tuition fees would be more expensive than the current £9,250, at about £11,000 per year.
The idea of a two-year degree has already been proposed earlier this year, but this current version moves more towards making it more cost effective for students.
As well as reduced tuition fees, students will save on living costs and will be able to start working a year earlier, Johnson says the new package could cut costs by £25,000.
It would also be cheaper for the government, which would have lower tuition fee loans to fund, with this fee arrangement intended to be available from autumn 2019.
