Lab hours and living costs
Overview of the argument
The RSC requires 300 lab hours for an accredited BSc degree in chemistry. This time could be spent on paid employment; this blog post reflects on whether the size of this requirement is such a great opportunity cost that it restricts access to chemistry.
Broadly, I will argue that the gap between student funding and the cost of living means that the current requirement of 300 hours is a massive sacrifice of earnings for students whose cost of living outstrips their income; it seems likely that chemistry degree outcomes will somewhat discriminate on the basis of personal wealth until either student incomes increase or the cost of living in modern Britain falls.
This poses an urgent education policy problem for the RSC as the cost of living in the UK is likely to increase steeply in the next few years. If it is to be inclusive of poor students, the extravagant 300h requirement for BSc accreditation should be reviewed without delay.
How much can a Student earn in 300h?
Students generally cannot access high-paying jobs. One effect of graduating is the scope to access better rates of pay and better working conditions. How much could a student earn if they weren’t doing the 300 hours of mandated lab time?
To answer this I mapped out the minimum wage levels for people aged 21 and 18 for the last few years. I then multiplied this by 300 and adjusted for inflation to map this onto 2021 values.
300 hours of minimum wage work for people aged 21 (black) and ~18 (magenta), adjusted by the rate of inflation to 2021 levels.
300 hours of lab work costs students the chance to earn something like £2000-2500 of 2021 money if they work at minimum wage. This is not an annual ‘hit’ - normally 300h is spread out over three years of study. A ball-park figure of £750/year is the focus of the discussion in this blog post. This will likely fall under the income tax threshold for students, but it will normally be diminished by at-source National Insurance contributions.
Of course, to earn this money you need to get a job. The pandemic has made this extraordinarily hard for students: bar work, the Costa in town, a couple of shifts a week selling tickets at the cinema - so many student-appropriate jobs were rendered impossible by the public health crisis.
Student Grants and Loans
Student tuition fees are typically accessed through a loan from the Student Loans Company (for students categorised as ‘home’ students). Students never see their tuition fee loan: it is paid directly to the University on the student’s behalf.
However, they can also access loans to help them cover everyday living costs. The structure of these loans used to respond to a study grant for students from households with low incomes, but the non-repayable grant was removed in 2016.
The maximum total income (i.e. for students from low-income households) which students could access is plotted below, together with the amount of 2021 money this is equivalent to after inflation. Note that the loss of the non-repayable grant was not fully compensated in 2015-16 by greater access to maintenance loans
The financial support available to students with the lowest family income under the English funding system. The grant system was abolished in 2016.
It is worth comparing the 2020-21 loan income level of appx £10k/year with other funding amounts in related policies.
The UKRI minimum PhD stipend is about £15k for 2021-22. The £15k level is intended to cover the cost of living, and in most cities this is plausible (there is an extra margin added if you live in London). £10k of undergraduate loan income is much less than this; living on UG loan income alone is not plausible.
The Welsh government has just unveiled a pilot scheme of Universal Basic Income for care leavers, which it is funding at the level of about £19k/year. This amount is particularly relevant because it speaks to the specific case of having no financial support from family. Loan income being about half of this again demonstrates that the current UG loan amount is insufficient for living costs.
Comparison of annual incomes under various regimes.
Student Cost of Living
People need to spend to study. Food, books, transport, a place to live. All of these require money.
The same standard of living requires more money each year. The rate of increase is not quite the same thing as the inflation of the overall economy: the products and services people need to access are not identical with those businesses use.
Two representative measures of the cost of living relevant to students are accommodation costs and the Retail Price Index.
Accommodation costs for students have risen since 2011. Though University-owned accommodation (loosely: halls of residence) have risen in average cost by about £650 in 2021 money since 2011, private accommodation has risen in inflation-adjusted price by about £1200 over the same period. Housing is more expensive than it used to be, even after thinking about inflation.
It is worth reflecting on how the opportunity cost of lab practicals (~£750/year) is of about the same order of magnitude as the increase in housing costs: a Chemistry student in 2021 has to do about a hundred hours of minimum-wage work to pay for a year accommodation of a comparable quality to 2011, and they also have to do about a hundred hours of lab practicals.
Rising annual costs of provider and private accommodation over time. Source: 2021 UniPol report.
The Retail Price Index loosely tracks how expensive it is to live in the UK. It generally goes up, meaning that £100 worth of stuff in 2009 costs more (£143) in 2021. You need a *lot* more money to survive today than you did in 2009. Importantly, this growth is bigger than inflation: student loan income has not ‘kept up’ with the increase in the RPI.
Growth of the retail price index. To buy stuff worth £100 in 2009, you would need £143 in 2021.
Comparing Income with Outgoings
So how do the numbers look overall? Broadly, student incomes have kept pace with inflation (the inflation-adjusted lines are quite flat) but the cost of living has outstripped inflation.
Comparison of various financial sources and costs relevant to students.
On this graph, the big problem is how the teal RPI line outstrips the magenta financial support one: the spending power of students has fallen significantly over the last decade.
How can students plug this gap? The two main options are family wealth (great if you have it, but not available to everyone) and working. Reducing spending is possible in principle, but student life is not generally full of lavish optional expenses: when >70% of your loan goes on rent, there isn’t much left.
Chemistry and Accreditation
Students cannot afford to study at University using only the Government’s funding and loans. This has been true for years, but the extent of the gap between funding and expenses has now widened to the point of seriously threatening the 300h lab requirement of the RSC. Students who don’t come from family wealth are being presented by the RSC with academic demands which have become unreasonable in the new economic context.
I have run advanced labs and fretted about whether we can afford to use this reagent for that many students in a lab practical for that many weeks (the gold reagent is expensive - could we make silver nanoparticle instead? Could students work in bigger groups?). But the question emerging from the looming cost-of-living crisis is its terrifying converse: can students afford to attend?
Some students definitely can. Good! They’ll learn great things in the lab! But who can’t afford to show up? What does the degree look like when students have differential access to teaching based on their wealth? Who gets a first when going to labs requires your parents to support you with money every month?
I’ve had students miss my labs from time to time because they were on zero-hours contracts and they were told to either attend the shift or lose the contract. This has been rare in my experience: students are keen to learn and they want to become better at practical chemistry.
But as financial pressure increases? As students are demonstrably under-funded to study? Chemistry becomes a degree which shackles students to an expensive opportunity cost. This is not about the occasional student prioritising beer money over learning how to use a Schlenk line; it is about students needing money for heating and being forced to miss their lab induction.
The structural issue is within the gift of the RSC to solve: they can reduce the required lab hours on an accredited degree. Is it appropriate to ask for students to do 300 lab hours when they can’t afford to forgo shift work? Are the requirements dreamt up in a more generous time suitable for today? Who will succeed - and who will fail - if the degree goes unchanged?
In my view, the already-massive lab hours requirement is likely to become an extraordinary burden for students without family wealth if the cost of living jumps without a matching increase in maintenance loans.
We have two options. We can either ignore the inequity and demand unreasonable hours of our least privileged students. Or we can reduce 300 hours to something more reasonable in the squeezed economic context of 2021.
Less immediately, we can lobby for more generous student funding for high-contact subjects. If the government’s industrial strategy demands a skilled scientific workforce, then becoming a skilled scientist needs to be(come) an economically viable prospect.