Results from the most recent Student Experience Survey, published last week, will have made grim reading for outgoing Vice-Chancellor Brian Cantor, after they revealed that The University of York has dropped almost 30 places, coming in at a dismal 61st in the rankings.
The university was not only trounced by its traditional competitors, including Warwick and Lancaster, but for the first time came in lower than local rivals York St John, who came 58th.
The survey, commissioned by Times Higher Education, is designed to compare feedback from students about the quality of many different aspects of university life, rather than simply measuring academic standards like the more traditional league tables.
As well as reviewing course structure and facilities, students were asked more general questions regarding ‘social life’ and ‘community atmosphere’. But need we take seriously a poll topped by The University of Dundee, who came in well ahead of world-renowned institutions including Oxford and Cambridge?
The answer is yes. At a time of economic instability, the first and foremost priority of many will be the employment prospects a degree can offer. But when they are now being asked to pay £9000 per year in tuition fees, prospective students also deserve to know more about the university experience they can expect and not simply the comparative worth of the piece of paper they will receive at the end of it all.
The Student Experience Survey has been rightly criticised for its small and unscientific sample size, having only taken into account the views of around one per cent of students. It is not, however, the only comparative measure of student opinion.
For the last seven years, the government funded National Student Survey (NSS) has offered a far wider picture of students’ views on their own institutions. The questionnaire, which all third years will have been asked to complete last term, ranks universities based on students’ opinions of teaching, assessment, learning resources, personal development opportunities and numerous other factors.
The NSS has, however, also been widely criticised since its introduction. Most recently, it came under fire at last month’s NUS National Conference in Sheffield. Delegates from the far-left condemned the poll as “a key element of neoliberal proposals to transform higher education into a marketable commodity” and called for a boycott.
It was argued that the survey “naturalises the idea of students as ‘customers’ and staff as ‘service providers'”. In a world where tuition fees are a reality and universities are actively engaged in attempts to attract the brightest and the best, surely any measure that gives prospective students power similar to consumers should be seen as a positive influence?
Problems have also been identified with the way the NSS, conducted by Ipsos MORI, is administered. Earlier this year, Vision called into question the apparent ease with which institutions could potentially fabricate results by impersonating students who failed to complete the survey and entering positive feedback on their behalf.
Cases have also come to light where there have been blatant attempts by institutions to persuade students to artificially inflate their approval ratings; in one particular instance, a lecturer at Kingston University told students that “if [we] come bottom … no one is going to want to employ you because they’ll think your degree is shit”.
The survey is also subject to manipulation by universities who incentivise an extremely high turnout. This waters down the impact of so-called ‘complainers’, who are far more likely to complete the survey out of their own volition.
Despite these apparent flaws, the NSS should be embraced as a useful tool for engaging with students on the elements of their degree that need to be improved. Proponents of the survey note that, as a direct result of its introduction, many institutions have introduced measures to constantly review student feedback.
Regardless of any imbalances in the ways the survey is conducted between different universities, it allows them to effectively monitor areas where they have improved year-on-year or where standards are falling within institutions or from the perspective of students.
The survey forces institutions to be more accountable to students and serves to identify key weakness that students’ unions can then campaign on to see addressed.
Recent improvements of the library and of campus accommodation, along with the expansion of Heslington East campus can be seen as attempts by the university to improve the student experience, but York is still woefully under performing in this area.
Cantor’s replacement must focus on delivering for existing students rather than on constant expansion, so that the university’s placing in the various student satisfaction tables does not undermine its strong academic reputation.