The amount of time that students in the UK are spending studying has markedly declined as more than two-thirds take up employment in response to financial worries. The Student Academic Experience Survey 2025 says that term-time employment has become “the new normal” and “even the new expectation” following the upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.

And rising levels of employment among full-time students are starting to affect how much time is spent on study, raising concerns about how money troubles are transforming the academic experience.

The survey, conducted by the Advance HE and the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), found the number of hours spent on independent study has fallen to 11.6 hours per week, down from 13.6 hours in 2024 and 15.7 hours in 2021 – a 26 percent decrease in five years.

While contact hours have changed little this year and remain close to the highest levels recorded in the 19-year survey, “the overall workload has declined strongly”, the report says, which “is perhaps understandable given the large majority of students who work for pay”. Report co-author Jonathan Neves, head of business intelligence and surveys at Advance HE, told Times Higher Education, “something had to give, and it looks like it’s independent study”.

Students who had previously attended private school are most likely to be undertaking paid work, with 77 percent of them carrying out paid work compared with 63 percent of state school students. But the report notes that private school students are much more likely to undertake only one to five hours of paid work per week, and are commonly doing so to “explore possible career paths”, compared with government school students who “did so to supplement living costs”.

Freeman says this trend could result in a “bifurcation” of the student experience and is reflective of the “graduate premium starting to decrease” as more young people attend university. “A degree is no longer the passport to a fantastic job that it might once have been, so students are looking for other ways to distinguish themselves, and I think high levels of part-time work, even among people from private schools, is probably evidence of that,” he says.