In order to overcome the shortage of medical practitioners, Rishi Sunak has announced support for moving from standard five or six-year medical degrees to a compressed four-year degree programme. The duration of other health science courses, like nursing, could also be shortened.
Many fret over whether this is possible without diluting quality. We don’t have to look far to dispel such worries. Since its inception, the independent University of Buckingham has championed accelerated two-year undergraduate degrees, and applied the same principles to accelerated medical degrees too.
Back in the early 1970s, the founders of the University College at Buckingham were perplexed as to why universities closed their doors to undergraduates from June to September. Not only was this a terrible waste of resources, it didn’t seem a pressing concern of undergraduates to go home to avoid the plague, prevalent in Oxford and Cambridge during Medieval Times, or to bring in the family harvest either, the historical reasons for the long summer hols.
The founders put an additional term where other universities have only holiday. With the additional teaching time, undergraduates could complete their degrees in only two years, entering the labour market a year earlier and with a year’s less living expense to boot.
