Pushing ‘the uni experience’ has strengthened the case for refunds

Back in May 2020, student Sophie Quinn gathered 330,000 signatures to a petition brought before the House of Commons Petitions Committee; disruption caused by a period of industrial action, followed by the first national lockdown, had led, she argued, to online higher education provision of variable quality, no access to campus facilities and lack of contact with staff.

Calling for a full or partial reimbursement of tuition fees, “Ms Quinn told an online session of the committee [that] students were feeling ‘angry and let down’ and had not got what they paid for”, according to BBC News.

Julia Buckingham, representing Universities UK, responded that fee refunds would place universities under “severe financial pressure” and argued that “universities are doing all they can to make sure that students achieve the learning outcomes they need”. The defence taken by UUK thus pinned “tuition fees” to “learning outcomes”, restricting the room for complaint.

More recently, students have argued for fee refunds by claiming the loss of “the uni experience” during the Covid era. As this is not always connected with complaints about deficient online teaching, students are clearly not alluding to tuition, or not to tuition alone.

This time, “the uni experience” seems to be something less quantifiable than the concerns articulated by Quinn.

THE Campus resource: How to offer students a rewarding university experience online

What is implied by the term, I think, speaks to the marketisation of the sector over the past decade − a result of the higher education funding model itself. During my undergraduate years in the late 1980s, “the uni experience” had not yet been invented as a concept, so it was not something I felt I was either “buying into” or “buying”.

But in the late 1980s, of course, the funding model of the sector was very different, so I was not “buying” anything. There were no tuition fees, and a modest grant paid for my accommodation. End-of-term snakebite-and-black overdrafts were repaid through temporary jobs, returning my bank account to a triumphant zero before the new term. It would have been impossible for me to feel that I had “not got what I paid for” when I went to university because I had not paid at all.

Today’s students most certainly pay: the average debt burden is £40,000 to £50,000 over the course of a standard three-year undergraduate programme. Despite this, according to statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, nearly 2.5 million 18-year-olds felt this was a price worth paying in 2017-18, partly because they believed that higher salaries over the course of a career depended on gaining a degree.

But the stats on graduate employability do not tell a consistent story of financial “value added” (much is discipline-dependent), so the sector has leaned increasingly heavily on the concept known as “the uni experience” to fill the student places on which the funding model relies.

This undefined “experience” has somehow become involved with the rationale of cost, despite contractual definitions of what tuition fees are supposed to cover. Its beauty as a concept is that it can mean more or less anything to more or less anyone: it is a blank canvas on to which individual desires and needs can be projected.

Unspecified, unquantified, the notion of “the uni experience” has helped to create the demand necessitated by the funding model; it has also left staff scrambling to satisfy a host of nebulous expectations they have not themselves created.

The result is that, on the issue of tuition fee refunds, the sector finds itself in a slightly tricky corner to defend. It will doubtless remind students that “tuition fees” cover “tuition” (contractually correct), that this has proceeded uninterrupted during lockdown (it has), and that “learning outcomes” have been achieved (they will be), largely through the tremendous efforts of staff.

THE Campus resource: Strengthening student services online

Because there have been no strikes by lecturers for nearly a year, and because the lockdown was hardly the sector’s fault, it is on firmer ground this time and will probably win the argument.

It needs to do so, because Buckingham was correct to note the “severe financial pressure” on universities; indeed, some may not survive the financial blow if fees were fully or partially refunded.

But just as the sector cannot be blamed for trying to protect its own long-term future, students who are aggrieved to have lost out on “the uni experience”, which they believe they have bought into in two senses, cannot be blamed for feeling as they do.

Instead of dividing into two antagonistic factions, I suggest we all raise searching questions about the sector’s funding model and about the marketisation it has generated. Herein lies the essential problem that the fee reimbursement issue has exposed.

Madeleine Davies is an associate professor of women’s writing at the University of Reading. The views expressed in this article are her own and are not necessarily reflective of the views of her employer.