I recently attended another acronym-laden meeting: HEPISG (Higher Education Public Information Steering Group) formerly the TQI/NSS Steering Group, to tell them about the Student Expectations of University project and the recent Policy Roundtable: ‘Myth Busting – How can we provide more accessible and accurate public information about universities in order to create realistic and manageable expectations?’.
I had a very brief few minutes in the spotlight, and packing in everything I needed and wanted to say was a bit tricky. A bit like Kirsty Allsopp on Location, location, location it would have been nice to knock a few walls down, move a few rooms about (figuratively speaking)… but still I got my message across: education, education, education (have I heard that somewhere before?) or in other words:
information is not enough, prospective students also need advice and guidance on how to make use of it.
I’m really pleased a lot of people have woken up to the idea that applicants need information to make a well-informed decision about university, but I do feel the need to re-iterate at every given opportunity, they do need more than that!
Hands up anyone who agrees (and #loveHE!)!
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Absolutely. Shove any amount of information in front of someone and it’s useless if you don’t know how to make sense of it all. Imagine someone handing you all the separate components needed to build a car and then being expected to build it yourself with no fuss…
How does a prospective student know what to do with the information if they haven’t been introduced to higher education yet? As with a car, you’d recognise some of the parts, but they would still mean nothing in isolation.
I think the guidance should go far enough to allow people an informed choice as to whether they even feel university is the best route for them to take. I feel this is necessary at a time when so many believe HE is the only possible choice to enhance career prospects. HE certainly can open doors and provide massive benefits, but it’s not the only way forward and it doesn’t automatically suit everyone.
Let’s make that information as easy to understand as possible, let’s give everyone as much chance to make the right choice, and let’s #loveHE to the max!
I think that Chris Humphries CBE (CEO, UK Commission on Employment and Skills) summarised our views quite succinctly when he spoke at the Lord Browne review Leicester public hearings earlier this year [1]:
“If we are expecting, as we have already done, the individual to pay more for their learning, and we are potentially expecting them to pay more in the future then it is time that we accepted that they are consumers and that they are entitled to high quality information and the sorts of intelligence that will enable them to make informed choices.”
Graduates now face tough competition in the job market and substantial debt on the one hand while prospective undergraduates find very little help in judging value for money (in terms of quality of experience, education, and prospects) on the other. I would (tentatively!) submit that very little information exists to help students currently – the student satisfaction survey, like most market research benchmarking tools works more for the institutions than the consumers they serve.
Until this is addressed, there exists a powerful disincentive for those less well off to burden themselves with debt that will take years to re-pay, especially with rapidly rising graduate unemployment.
What consumers value most in making purchasing decisions is feedback from their peers, yet this kind of information is very difficult to come by. There is little qualitative information out there; hopefully this will be considered as part of the JISC-funded project mentioned [2] at the round-table.
For more on our take on providing students with high quality information, we wrote a brief blog post just over a month ago: Helping Students Make Informed Choices[3].
^CK
[1] http://hereview.independent.gov.uk/hereview/2010/06/videos-of-leicester-public-hearing
[2] http://www.gold.ac.uk/staff/feature2/title,21056,en.php
[3] http://blog.evansfinch.co.uk/2010/06/18/helping-students-make-informed-choices/