Why tuition fees haven't improved university teaching

By Gervas Huxley

 
Last year’s furious student protests reminded us that few political debates are as divisive as the battle over tuition fees.

But if the warring parties can agree on anything – optimistic as that sounds – it’s surely that tuition fees should at least benefit the students who pay them. In other words, funding provided by undergraduates should mean better-quality teaching.

Unfortunately, that simply hasn't happened. Why? Because the lack of resources which tuition fees were designed to solve was only ever one part of the problem. So long as higher education does not provide incentives for academics to prioritise teaching, standards will continue to suffer.

Tuition fees were introduced in 1998 in response to a fall in revenue per student from around 1980, itself driven by the desire of successive governments to increase participation in higher education without bothering to actually pay for it.

It is no great leap of logic to suggest student teaching suffered as a result. Thankfully, although a lack of data makes comparisons difficult, we have a comprehensive report which documents many of the ways in which teaching has changed.

The Robbins Report of 1963 – a Royal Commission on the future of higher education set up by the Macmillan government – describes a university system with teaching at its centre.

While the report shows student ‘contact hours’ in the Sixties were similar to today's, class sizes – with the enduring exception of Oxbridge’s tutorial system – have since increased significantly.

Students also received more feedback – 70 per cent of humanities students and 65 per cent in social sciences received written comments and discussed their work with tutors. Modern students are rarely so lucky.

And while the report shows PhD students did teach in 1963, this was far less widespread than today. PhD students did not teach in the arts, humanities or social sciences, while in science departments teaching they were restricted to supervising practicals.

But these statistics alone understate the seriousness of the decline in university teaching. After all, the introduction of tuition fees – and recovery of revenue and resources – since 1998 has done little to resolve such teaching shortfalls.

Instead a fundamental change in the way higher education works continues to depress teaching standards. There has been a seminal shift in what Robbins referred to as the “balance between teaching and research”.

The Robbins Report makes clear that by no means all academics were research-active in 1963:

"There are many persons of first class ability … who have never engaged in research in the narrow sense or have felt any urge to publish, but whose breadth of culture, rightness of judgment and wide ranging intellectual curiosity are priceless assets in a department or a college ... Original work is essentially personal and, though it should be fostered and encouraged, it should not be forced or imposed as a duty on all teachers."

On the overall balance between teaching and research, the authors were broadly satisfied. But in one prescient comment this view was qualified:

"The extent to which a narrow criterion of academic excellence has invaded British Universities is sometimes overstated. But we are convinced that the danger exists. ... It may make persons without either the gift or any genuine urge to engage in research do so because they feel that promotion depends on it."

The authors were correct – the increasing priority attached to research in recent decades has undermined the informal division of labour that used to permit some academics to focus on teaching with little risk to their academic career or their department’s academic reputation.

And it has created a world where, in Lord Robbins’ words, “teaching and supervision are all too often regarded as an evil subtracting from one’s own research”.

Teaching standards will inevitably suffer in a world in which academics are given little or no incentive to teach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the introduction of tuition fees alone has done nothing to change this.

Gervas Huxley is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol and consults on Higher Education policy. These are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Bristol.