The last few years have seen upheavals in UK higher education. Coupled with apocalyptic visions about the possible future of the sector, we are clearly living in interesting times, where changes in finance, in technology and in students and staff themselves mean that we don’t stand still, but constantly evolve or face extinction.

Those with longer memories would suggest that “twas ever thus”. The growth of universities in industrial towns in the 19th century, The expansion after the Robbins report. The move from a binary system, leading to polytechnics and universities being on the same footing. The growth of private providers. Wherever you sit on an exponential curve, it will always seem to be exponential.

A key change for us all to grapple with though, is the nature of the “student experience”, and ensuring that our students are not just satisfied in a simplistic customer-supplier relationship, but that they are gaining real long term benefit from their investment in higher education, no matter what kind of student they are.

In an earlier article I referred to the report from Mike Boxall of PA consulting which was proposing a “student deal”, which was more encompassing than the sometimes limited approach that universities take to describing student experience. In the last week Smita Jamdar, of SGH Martineau, has written a blog article on “Price is what you pay, value is what you get“.

In this, Smita looks at the view of the Office of Fair Trading which said ““There are worrying signs the higher education market is not working to promote value for money for students, and this has to change” and considers what this means from a legal perspective.

She identifies three main points:

The first is that there is not necessarily any consensus on what it looks like in the context of tertiary education. Many of those responding to the YouGov poll emphasised employability as key, but it is not clear if students themselves see this as the main benefit. Which? has previously linked value to contact hours and quality/frequency of feedback as well as long term graduate salaries. However, at a conference I attended yesterday, Toni Pearce, President of the NUS, described a focus on contact hours as reductionist.

The second is that that alternatives to higher education are becoming increasingly well promoted. Apprenticeships and higher apprenticeships, for example, are now viable options for more young people, so being able to articulate the value for money a degree or similar qualification offers in comparison is important in beating off this competition for would-be students.

The third is that universities and colleges are not necessarily very good at articulating the value for money they offer

Smita argues that it is important to understand what value is, to minimise student complaints. Value therefore has to go beyond the simple transactional “I paid my fees, I expect to receive this many lectures”.

The current obsession with providing more external data, such as through KIS, means that we are in danger of embedding this approach to value and reducing it to a simplistic or mechanistic system that cannot measure the true benefits to students. The number of ccntact hours is an obvious case. Again, as Smita rightly argues:

unless institutions can articulate value better, any investigation by the OFT is likely to be dominated by a push for more data to enable direct comparison of institutional offers, and the linking of price to measurables such as contact hours, rather than by a recognition of the diverse and distinct benefits that different institutions offer

The challenge for us then, is to clearly articulate what we mean by student experience, byt engaging more closely with our students and other stakeholders, to produce a broader description of what the “deal” is. This will mean clearly showing what fees are to cover (including a clear articulation of how loans actually work, the RAB charge and the expectations and commitments to paying back).In addition, the deal must show how the student is engaged in a two way relationship with the provider, and where responsibilities for success lie at the interface between the two, and require active engagement of the two, rather than the reductive transactional view.

Universities need to seize the initiative on communicating this. We need to be able to show clearly that our students are not just passive consumers, but actively engaged in a relationship with us; that there is more to education than the sticker price, and that the full value of higher education cannot be reduced to a simple set of metrics, driven by a consumer campaign group approach.