Abstract
This paper reports on recent research aimed at assessing how the management of the undergraduate student experience in English higher education is changing in the light of the new tuition fee regime introduced in 2012, as well as other government policies aimed at creating market-type pressures within the higher education sector. A distinction was observed between the research-intensive universities studied – defined here as institutions where research income comprised 20 per cent or more of total turnover, with correspondingly strong positions in published research-based rankings – and universities largely dependent on income from teaching, with weaker market positions. Broadly speaking, the latter group were responding to market pressures by centralizing services, standardizing procedures, and strengthening management controls over teaching processes. The research-intensive universities tended to work within existing institutional cultures to respond to students' needs. Organizational change here usually took the form of creating more coherent functional groupings of student services, rather than comprehensive reorganizations. It appears to us that these different responses to a changed environment point to the creation of two distinct English university types, one strongly managerial with 'student as customer' orientations, and a smaller group with less centralized, more collegial cultures.
Highlights
This paper reports on research undertaken in 2014 aimed at assessing how changes to the English1 higher education ‘landscape’ were affecting the undergraduate student experience, whether institutions were responding to these changes in different ways, and the effectiveness of these changes
We found that our non-research-intensive universities have all responded in similar ways to the changed higher education landscape of the last few years
It could be argued that this fracture is long-standing feature of English higher education, dating back at least to the creation of the polytechnics in the 1960s and 1970s, or perhaps to the establishment of the ‘civic’ universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Summary
This paper reports on research undertaken in 2014 aimed at assessing how changes to the English higher education ‘landscape’ were affecting the undergraduate student experience, whether institutions were responding to these changes in different ways, and the effectiveness of these changes. The research focused on how institutional management decisions were affecting the student experience, rather than on teaching and learning activities.We appreciate that many accounts of the student experience include aspects of teaching and learning (for example, the Times Higher Education student experience survey of UK universities does so), but we consider it helpful to distinguish between the two. Just as our distinction between what we regard here as the student experience and teaching and learning is imprecise, so the boundaries between our student journey categories must be blurred: aspects of ‘the campus experience’ – for example, student social life and the standard of accommodation – will affect a student’s ‘academic experience’, as will the organizational issues surrounding learning in which we are interested here. Further studies are needed to support or to challenge the claims that we make here
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