This year, my college increased their tuition fees for higher education courses by £500 - up from £7,500 to £8,000. The rationale for this has never been made clear. Indeed, there have been no increases in running costs as far as I know; temporary and sessional staff have been laid off and more work has been directed towards existing permanent staff; the library budget has not been expanded; and the demand for our product (ie, courses) has also not gone up. Classical economics predicts price hikes accompany a rise in demand - but no such rise has occurred. But maybe I am looking at this all wrong. If so, the reason is because I am being led astray by the term “tuition fees”. It is a complete misnomer.
When students pay “tuition fees”, they are assuming that the money they stump up does exactly what it says on the tin - it is for tuition. If only that were true! For a start, teachers and tutors would no doubt have better salaries. The use of this phrase to gloss over the costs students incur for their education leads to a range of unhelpful misperceptions. Firstly, students’ and parents’ heightened expectations of the tuition they will get means that they expect courses undertaken to magically lead to high-grade scores. In short, they believe that merely by covering and regurgitating the provided course content, a distinction grade or upper second should be secured.
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The notion that a good degree requires additional reading beyond the course content and that students are responsible for their own learning gets lost. The post-mortem conversation with students who have not done as well as they had hoped often goes along the lines of, “well, I put a lot of time into my revision and I read everything you gave me”. Paying a “tuition fee” does not mean the course is providing “correct answers” to be reproduced in assessments - critical thinking is still needed.
By calling the costs involved in education “tuition fees”, the government did colleges and universities no favours. It turned courses into consumer products - modules that are effectively marketed as pre-packaged microwaveable portions of learning. The editorial process of deciding which areas of a syllabus to include or exclude had been made in advance rather than negotiated with students via the very arguments and debates that should constitute the education process. Sadly, “tuition fees” promotes the expectation that education is about passing exams. The effects of this are borne out in the way students judge the value of learning in terms of whether it will be on the test or not. If not, then the content is deemed a waste of time. In short, the idea of a tuition fee has made learners more passive and accepting of what they are given to learn; they consume their microwaved intellectual diet rather than challenge it.
For some universities, the tuition fee has led to objections to classes being taught by anyone who is not a full doctor or professor. Using PhD students to teach seminars can sometimes lead to complaints even though giving such students the chance to develop their teaching skills and to earn some cash is perfectly reasonable. After all, as long as they are diligent and conscientious in their preparation, there is a strong case to be made that they may bring fresh energy and motivation to the seminar room that a more established researcher may long since have lost. But, again, blinkered by the “tuition fee” label, it suddenly becomes unacceptable to some who feel they are not getting what they shelled out for.
Executive salary and other expenses fee
Clearly, a new descriptor is needed - one more reflective of where the student loan money actually goes. “University development fee”, perhaps? After all, the cash often goes to new buildings and to expanding provision for extra student places in order to keep the money flowing inwards. Or how about “executive salary and other expenses fee” - which points to the widening gap between teacher and management salaries within educational institutions.
If it were truly a tuition fee, then costs would be coming down and not rising! In the same way that a council tax bill is itemised to reveal the areas of council spending and the percentages awarded to each, the same should happen with tuition fees. Students should be explicitly informed about the specific directions their cash is being directed so that teachers do not have to take the brunt of complaints when value for money is questioned.
With courses funded by student loans with a long repayment schedule and degree courses seen as passports to jobs, students will continue to pay whatever the invoice requires (within reason). But let’s stop perverting language and lying by omission when we call these charges “tuition fees” - they are not. With greater fee transparency, students may come to demand less spoon-feeding from their teachers and have more realistic expectations of themselves and their courses. Education would be the winner if that were to happen.
Rufus Reich is a pseudonym. The writer is an FE lecturer in England
