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Nick Hillman, a former adviser to David Willetts and now director of the higher education thinktank Hepi, reveals the latest findings of Hepi's annual student survey.
The first batch of students to pay the full £9,000 tuition fees in UK universities think they are getting poor value for money, a new survey has found.
The Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) has been surveying students about their experiences ever since Tony Blair increased tuition fees to £3,000 back in 2006. This year, in conjunction with the Higher Education Academy, we asked 15,000 full-time undergraduate students across the UK and in all years of study to tell us how they are faring.
Results follow the pattern of previous years: students show a high level of satisfaction with their courses, but they appear to be working less hard than guidelines say they should.
This year's survey is much more revealing than earlier ones, however, because it also displays the first comprehensive picture of those students paying £9,000 to attend English higher education institutions. The proportion of first- and second-year students in England who think they are getting poor value for money is around twice as high as in the past and now stands at one in three students.
And while they express similarly high levels of satisfaction as those studying elsewhere in the UK, they are much less likely to think they are getting value for money: 70% of undergraduates at Scottish institutions, who typically pay no fees, believe they are receiving good or very good value for money, compared with only 41% in England, where most fees are now £9,000.
This year's survey also includes the first detailed questioning of students on their overall wellbeing. We have replicated the questions asked of the general population by the Office for National Statistics.
The results are surprising, at least for anyone who believes the caricature of carefree happy-go-lucky students, because on average, students are less content than the population as a whole: 62% rate themselves as happy, compared with 72% of the general population.
Students prefer smaller classes
The survey includes a wealth of data on teaching and learning. It shows wide variations in the total workload of students, according to discipline, institution and year of study.
Students with nine or fewer contact hours are notably less satisfied than those with more.
There is also a clear inverse correlation between how useful students find their classes and how big they are. Half of students in classes of between one and five students find them very beneficial, but only 10% of those in classes of more than 100 students say the same.
When students are asked to pick three areas where universities should spend their money, the top answer by some distance – chosen by 45% – is "reducing fee levels". Beyond fees, students are clear that they want "more teaching hours", "better training for lecturers" and "better learning facilities". They give much less priority to "better pay for staff", "better buildings" and "giving academics more time for research".
Policymakers should listen to students
Universities are likely to point out that they don't have extra money to spend in practice because the higher fees are largely a replacement for public funding that has been cut. And whatever the outcome of the next general election, austerity may continue for years to come.
There will be renewed pressure on the amount of money available for educating each student when the student number cap comes off in 2015. It may be that next year we need to ask the question in a different way, looking at where any cuts should fall rather than priorities for spending.
The government has its own official survey of students called the National Student Survey but, as this is a survey of final-year students, it doesn't yet include a single undergraduate paying £9,000 fees.
So policymakers, as well as higher education institutions, need to listen to the views of students expressed in the Hepi/HEA survey. It is methodologically robust, UK-wide and comprehensive – and its results are both comforting and worrying.
Nick Hillman is the director of Hepi. Follow him on Twitter @nickhillman.
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