Josh Blacker's Blog

I’ve started noticing a lot recently arguments that students may not be getting ‘value for money’. One particular quote – from a student – I head on BBC News went something like this:

It’s not fair. My friends doing engineering get much more contact time than me, and we’re paying the same.

Now, this student was an Arts and Humanities student. She doesn’t need lots of contact time. In fact, as an English graduate myself, the fewer lectures the better – teaching (whether in lectures or seminars) is not there to give you the answers and hope you understand. It’s there to stimulate that latent creative reading genius in your head, so you can come up with your own answer, in your own time. That own time should be spent in the library, or reading at home. I was never under any doubt that I was expected to put in a full week of work to get a first. I didn’t, and I didn’t get a first.

Yes, there needs to be an adequate amount of teaching time, in a form appropriate to the subject. But measuring the ‘value for money’ of a degree in terms of the hours given by university staff towards it (which doesn’t count preparation time, of course…) is a false economy.

This brings us on to the second point. Studying at university isn’t an ‘I pay, you give’ relationship. If I’d paid my £3,000 up front in my first year (when it was £3,000) and failed my sessional exams, whose fault would it be? My own. It’s not like paying £3,000 for a Mac Pro that never turns up – in that case, you could make a fuss and expect some compensation because it’s a consumer relationship. You pay, you (expect to) get.

University, however, shouldn’t be a case of students complaining they’re not getting value for money. You can’t, when so much of the responsibility lies on your own shoulders.

Obviously, universities need to maintain standards. Teaching spaces need to be clean, comfortable and adequately sized. Feedback needs to be of a high standard so you can learn from it; assessment criteria need to be explicit before you start. If you’ve been told you’ll be taught by experts in their fields, a first year shouldn’t feature only PhD students teaching you. None of these, however – none – have anything to do with an arbitrary cash transaction that doesn’t even really happen until a year after you finish. (Sorry to ignore international students here – there are other issues to deal with in that case.)

If anything, tuition fees are a misnomer. We pay to join a community of learning. (At least in the current funding regime; previously, there was no ‘joining fee’, and as one alumni told me the other day, he came out of university with a cash surplus!) That’s what the arguments should be about – not whether a particular university course is ‘value for money’ or if students get ‘enough’ time with lecturers (bearing in mind, lots of us in the Arts and Humanities skip lectures because we might view particular lectures irrelevant to our own interests!).

The question we should be asking – of ourselves, of universities, and of the public – is, “Should we have to pay to join a learning community?”