“Students as consumers in their education: where student fees go, how universities explain their financial decisions to students, the public and government”
- Professor Simon Gaskell, Principal, Queen Mary University of London
- Nick Hillman, Director, Higher Education Policy Institute
- Sorana Vieru, Vice-President (Higher Education), National Union of Students
Professor Simon Gaskell began his comments by establishing his position that students should be considered as co-creators of their education. However he proposed that it was the increase to fees of £9,000 that has prompted universities to work out how and where their finances are being spent. He noted that the full costing of these fees must take account of spending on infrastructure and make allowance of spending on widening participation activities such as bursaries and scholarships.
Professor Gaskell went on to discuss cross subsidy between courses, noting that if you compare the least expensive disciplines to teach with the most expensive, such as medicine and dentistry, there is close to a factor of two difference in the real cost. For some courses, particularly those that are laboratory based, institutions are receiving a fee which is much lower than the real cost. All universities with a wide disciplinary spread cross-subsidise. He went onto describe the communication challenge for institutions. Universities do provide information about how money is spent in the round to their students, but the question needs to be posed of whether individual students would be content with the knowledge that they are subsidising other students and other courses.
Other challenges arise from the terminology that institutions use and are required to use. Institutions talk, correctly in accounting terms, about their surplus. The implication of the word surplus is that there is funding that is surplus to requirements, but this is not the case. What institutions are actually referring to is the funding which is available to spend on maintenance or improvements, for IT or Library facilities for example, and sometimes this ‘surplus’ is inadequate for those purposes.
He summarised his points by saying that institutions are faced with the challenge of how to communicate to their students, not only on the use of fees, but to justify and explain the sorts of cross-subsidies within universities that provide a wide range of subjects.