Is higher education a rip-off?

Students in most English universities will next year pay £9000/year for their three-year degree course. Is this £27,000 value for money? One way of determining this (popular with governments) is to promote higher education as a personal investment, with a financial return to the student in the form of increased future earnings. However, there is little reliable data on which to base such a calculation. Information about earnings after university comes from data collected before the current recession and at a time when a much smaller proportion of school-leavers attained a degree. The investment model is in any case of dubious value because higher education should be much more than just a means to the end of accumulating ever more possessions.

A more appropriate way of assessing value for money is to calculate how much a good  university education should cost to deliver, and whether this corresponds to what students will be charged in fees. Anybody who has worked in a university will suspect that they operate at less than optimal efficiency. Expensive lecture theatres and teaching laboratories are used for 26 or so weeks/year. There is an expectation in many universities that all academic staff will do research as well as teaching, thereby avoiding the gains that accrue through specialisation. Courses may take years to set up, and universities commonly offer many degree programmes with small numbers of students.

So let’s imagine a university that operates more efficiently but still delivers a high quality of education. In the first place, it will aim to make better use of its capital and human resources by teaching three 15-week semesters/year, instead of the usual two. To calculate how much this will cost, we can simplify things by omitting STEM (science , technology, engineering and medicine) courses because they incur high equipment costs for which universities are compensated by a central government grant. How much teaching should students receive? Over the last few years, universities have reduced teaching hours and increased the number of students in small group teaching (some have 20 or so per ‘small group’). There is also a trend to offload undergraduate teaching to postgraduate students. These trends have their apologists, who say that the quality of the teaching is more important than contact hours. But this is rather like parents who pursue their own careers rather than spend time with their children, and then rationalise this by saying the hour or so they do spend is ‘quality time’.

My imaginary university will do none of those things: all students will receive 20 hours face-to-face lectures/week, plus one hour/week of small group tutorials in groups of ten students, all led by academic staff. How many academic man-hours would this involve? I estimate that each one-hour lecture needs four hours to prepare, but only one hour to revise for the next time it is given, and that each lecture needs a thorough revision once every five years. This gives a mean of 1.6 man-hours of preparation for each hour of lecturing. Small groups require less preparatory work - about one hour for a new tutorial and half an hour to revise. This gives a mean of 0.6 man-hours preparation for each set of tutorials. My imaginary university operates on the Melbourne model, with a small number of large degree programmes - let’s say each has an annual intake of 100 students. The 15th week of each semester will be allocated for exams. No course work will be marked (except as a formative assessment) because of the large and growing problem of agencies which write essays, dissertations and even theses for a fee. Student examinations will each take one hour to mark for each semester, requiring 300 hours for the programme each year.

Based on this data, we can calculate the academic man-hours to deliver each programme as 3156/year. If we assume that each academic works 30h/week on teaching (including preparation time) for 45 weeks/year, this indicates a requirement for 2.3 academics for each year’s intake of 100 students. This would mean a teaching team of 4.6 academic staff for the course as a whole. Let’s assume that the mean staff costs/academic are £50,000/year, resulting in £116,888 cost/year. Academic staff costs are about 36% of total university costs, which would produce a cost of £324,689/100 students, equivalent to fees of £3,247/year and £6,494 for the full degree course.

It would be possible to reduce these fees even lower if some efficiencies could be attained in university administration, which has expanded in recent years because of the spread of quality assurance paperwork and the increasing complexity of the admission process. Universities also have a tendency to build expensive monumental buildings, sports centres, art galleries, conference centres, performance venues and so on. My imaginary university would concentrate on academic matters rather than entertainment (which is available in plenty in the areas in which most students live). Finally, many universities subsidise research from teaching income. The strategy here has been to enhance the prestige of the university (and of course its senior academics), thereby attracting students who wish to attend a prestigious university however limited its commitment to teaching. In my imaginary university, the emphasis would be on scholarship rather than the more circumscribed activity of research. Research would take place, but in defined research centres, which would be expected to be financially self-supporting.

These figures are of course speculative. It could be argued that there should be a balance more in favour of small group teaching rather than lectures, or that some non-STEM courses incur higher costs such as those in the arts (which require specialised equipment and incur high material costs). People who propose such arguments are welcome to make their own revised calculations. A further criticism is that academic staff would be unwilling to spend so much time on teaching. This is probably true of many academics at present, but the solution lies in recruiting people who enjoy teaching for its own sake, combined with a strong desire to keep abreast of current knowledge in their field.

Is this imaginary university ever likely to happen? I would prefer it to be a co-operative, run by its staff on John Lewis lines. But it is rather more likely that private organisations will spot the commercial advantages, charge rather more than £6,494/course but a lot less than the market rate of £27,000. Perhaps then students in the more expensive universities will realise how much they are being ripped off.