A university official charged with recruiting students tells Will Hazell of his fears that higher fees are cutting student numbers and reducing efficiency.
“I’m head of recruitment and admissions for an English university. We’re fairly large – 20,000 students – and we’re a campus-based, multi-faculty, research-led institution. I lead a department which is responsible for the full range of activities to recruit students to the university, from open days, visit days and producing student recruitment literature, to school and college liaison and outreach work. We process about 30,000 applications and over £10m in student financial support per annum. The work of my department, in essence, revolves around identifying the students we want to recruit, attracting them, and ensuring they register with us.
I’ve worked in UK higher education for over 20 years, and have rarely seen as much turbulence in the sector as in the last few years. A number of policies have come together to create a perfect storm. We have not yet had enough time to judge the true impact of the rise in tuition fees to £9,000 a year: applications rose slightly this year, but they still haven’t recovered to the volumes we saw before the big rise in fees. I think it’s going to be some time before we see the market stabilise and we can really see what the impact is.
What we do know is that the fee increase has caused a change in applicant behaviour. On the whole they are far more discerning, which is a good thing: they are doing more research, and arrive much better informed about their degree programmes, the institution and what it offers. But I still worry that the increased cost has put able students off pursuing higher education.
I don’t think the government’s attempt to introduce a market into higher education has been very effective. Fees were capped at £9,000, so though there was rhetoric about introducing a free market that didn’t really happen. Although institutions can vary how much they charge, the overwhelming majority introduced fees of £9,000, including us.
Proper competition on price failed to occur for a number of reasons. First, price was seen as an indicator of quality: if you weren’t charging £9,000, it said something about the quality of the institution. Second, the scale of the cuts to higher education meant most places had no choice but to charge the full amount. And third, the government’s loan repayment scheme meant that the difference to students between borrowing £7,000 per annum and £9,000 per annum was negligible.
Generally speaking, I think the aspiration to marketise the sector is misguided. Trying to create a market in higher education is costly because institutions end up diverting funds towards marketing and promotion. This is not money which is particularly well spent because it doesn’t enhance universities’ core ‘product’: it doesn’t improve the quality of teaching or the student experience – it just tries to buy the student in. Institutions were already competing to enhance the core product some time ago – that was achieved through the introduction of league tables and the National Student Survey – so I don’t think you had to increase fees to make universities more responsive to students’ requirements.
Meanwhile, UKBA’s crackdown on sponsorship of international students put a chill through the whole sector. Removing the right of [London Metropolitan University] to sponsor visas caused huge concerns among international students. The timing of the announcement – in August – couldn’t have been worse; returning students were told while they were home for the summer that they had limited time to find another institution, and students planning on starting in the UK in September were concerned it might happen to them too. The contribution international students make to the economy is considerable, and the benefit to the UK when they return to their home countries as ‘ambassadors’ is invaluable. To attempt to manage the government’s commitment to reduce immigration via bona fide students is misguided, and the crackdown on reputable institutions at a critical time in the recruitment cycle was badly managed.
The increased importance attached to the widening access agenda has been an important step forward in recent years. The requirement for universities to produce access agreements – detailing their strategies for widening access to higher education – and to have them approved by the Office for Fair Access before they can charge full fees, mean that institutions have had to tangibly demonstrate their commitment to the idea that university is for everyone with ability. However, we used to produce access agreements every three years; now we have to write them annually. So we’re required to write the next agreement before we know the impact of the last one! Outreach activities take a long time to come to fruition, and the necessity of working long-term and having a long-term vision should never be overlooked.”