Just because Humanities students have fewer contact hours, doesn’t mean we don’t work

It’s an age old argument – humanities students don’t have many contact hours and therefore don’t do any work/have an easy degree/can’t complain about their workload. This is an argument that usually comes from the mouths of smug engineering/science/medical students, amongst others.

Now, however, data released by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) seems to support this, with the Institute’s 2014 Student Academic Experience Survey showing that those who study history, business and social studies work the least hours in a week (at 23, 24 and 25 respectively). In contrast, those who study medicine, architecture or dentistry work the most, at 38 hours a week.

These figures come from an average workload figure for these subjects from several different universities However, it’s unclear how ”workload” has actually been defined, apart from the obvious contact hours element, and therefore I feel it is difficult to say whether these are an accurate representation of hours studied without surveying a range of people studying each individual course.

Even then, you are extremely likely to find huge discrepancies between the amount of private study one person does compared to someone else studying the exact same course. There will always be those people who believe they can breeze through their degree without doing any work, in the same way as there will always be those people who spend more time working than you thought humanly possible.

It’s very possible that there’s too much of an obsession with contact hours and workload anyway – at the end of the day, didn’t we all choose to do the degree we’re doing knowing full well what that would involve in terms of contact hours?

Moreover, it is often the case that students on courses with fewer contact hours tend to have more required of them in terms of private study; whether that is fulfilled is another question. For example, I study law, so I have 12 contact hours a week, but I am expected to supplement that with an additional 30 hours per week, mostly reading. This means that I don’t feel like my “workload” is much less than those who do, say, Engineering, who have close to 20-30 contact hours a week but are required to do much less work in their own time.

It’s very possible that there’s too much of an obsession with contact hours and workload anyway – at the end of the day, didn’t we all choose to do the degree we’re doing knowing full well what that would involve in terms of contact hours? I think it’s time we stopped worrying about how much work everyone else is doing, and got on with our own.

Alannah Jefferies

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