[stoney]

The quality of UK university courses varies tremendously. I studied engineering as did lots of my friends. The standard course length for an MEng is 4 years, I think that might even be a requirement to get the course accredited.

But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at least full time if not more.

So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be in uni for longer.