10 things I learned from the 2019 Student Academic Experience Survey

I have a lot of time for the Student Academic Experience Survey, organised each year by the Higher Education Policy Institute and Higher Education Academy.

That’s not to say that it’s perfect. It only surveys undergraduate students. It takes responses from students at all points of study even though research shows that students' views change over their time at university. It surveys a total of less than 1% of all UK students.

However, it achieves a great balance between engagement / reflective questions and satisfaction questions (a topic for another day). It breaks down its results by types of students, so that top level figures don’t mask vast differences across student populations. Most importantly, it doesn’t attempt to rank universities and thus it hasn’t been open to gaming and pressuring over the 13 years that it’s been running (unlike certain other surveys).

I find it very useful, so I thought I’d pull out 10 useful things from this year’s results that you might like to know (without going through the full report):

1.      Students have reported a second year of improved perceptions around value for money – with 41% of students perceiving good or very good value for money compared to 29% perceiving poor or very poor. However, the reverse trend is true for EU students, whose perceptions of value for money has dropped from 47% to 44% in the last year

2.      Very few students think that it’s reasonable for a university to spend money raising its profile (14%) or recruiting students (16%). Given the increases in expenditure towards these aims in recent years, it suggests that universities have a tough job ahead to explain to students why money is being spent in this way

3.      Poor teaching quality was the main reason why 13% of students said that their university experience had been worse than they expected. However, more students said that teaching quality was a reason why their university experience was better than they expected

4.      64% of students said that they were happy with their choice of university and subject. This is notably lower than the sector average satisfaction score in the NSS (83%). Perhaps this is because NSS is only open to final year students, who are more committed to their choice by the point of answering. Or perhaps it’s because the HEPI survey prompts students to think about the alternatives, whereas the NSS question is simply a 5 point scale

5.      On a number of factors (value for money, amount they think they’ve learnt, whether their experience was better than expected, etc.), BME students are giving lower scores than white students

6.      Students who have between 10-29 contact hours a week are happier than those who have fewer or more. The perception on this topic hasn’t really changed over the years, but it is notable that students who have fewer than 10 contact hours a week are much less satisfied

7.      A majority of students say that teaching staff did not help them to explore their own areas of interest; however this type of help was more likely to be offered at Post-92 (38%) and Specialist universities (52%) compared to Russell Group (32%) and Pre-92 institutions (33%)

8.      The sector has generally seen improvements across the board when it comes to assessment and feedback, but there is still clearly a long way to go in some areas – e.g. only 39% of students said that they were given feedback on draft work. 63% of students said that feedback could be improved if there was more detail on why the mark was awarded

9.      There have been a lot of headlines today around whether universities could contact parents / guardian if they were worried about student's mental health. Whilst a majority of students said that they would be happy for this to happen in extreme circumstances (81%), there has been no definition of what ‘extreme circumstances’ would include. A higher proportion of older students would never want their parents / guardian to be contacted (24% compared to 18% of all survey respondents)

10.  Unsurprisingly, a majority of students (65%) still believe that the government should pay more than students when it comes to the funding of higher education. This is clearly different from the recommendations of the Augar review, which maintain the amount and proportion paid by students should remain the same (as despite a headline fee cut, there would be harsher repayment conditions).

Were there any other findings / results that you found interesting in the survey?