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Fees too high or everything getting worse? Or a bit of both?
One of the more annoying things about “value for money” polling as it relates to higher education is the inability to distinguish between the opinion that university-level study is not good value in a general sense, and the opinion that £9,000 and above is just way too much for a person to pay for a year of undergraduate provision (especially when older graduates paid a lot less).
The first is, clearly, of huge concern to providers and to everyone involved in higher education. The second – well, I’ve heard vice chancellors, lecturers, politicians, and people at the bar argue that the perception and experience of individual debt is unfair and inequitable.
New polling from YouGov, covering 4,000 graduates from universities in England, sheds some welcome light. Some 53 per cent of graduates who paid more than £9,000 (from 2012 onwards) feel that this was fairly or very bad value for money – compared to 35 per cent who paid £3,000 a year (2006 to 2011) and 22 per cent who paid £1,000 a year (1998 to 2005). Among those who paid no tuition fees (started before 1998) it was just 3 per cent.
Now, there are still two valid readings here:
And it is equally possible that an element of both may be contributing. Yougov asked the same groups whether the quality of teaching was “good” or “bad” – this peaks at 93 per cent “good” in the pre-fee years and falls to 82 per cent for those at university during the pandemic (starting between 2017 and 2021).
There’s also been a drop across these fee level cohorts regarding expectations of higher earnings over time, although most recent graduates expect greater lifetime earnings. Some 70 per cent of all graduates think their degree has been helpful for their career so far, most (57 per cent) think it would be helpful in future too.
Polling like this is a step above what we usually deal with – but we still can’t reliably disaggregate graduate perceptions of quality from opinions about graduate debt incurred, any more than we can reliably disaggregate graduate outcomes from the wider state of the economy.