Russell Lynch: Universities keep students in dark over rip-off fees

Hundreds of thousands of sixth-formers will be tearing open their A-Level results in two weeks’ time and, if their grades are up to scratch, they’ll be off to university within weeks.

But how many of them are being ripped off in the process?

It’s a worthwhile question when the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently told us that the average student is going to graduate with debts of more than £50,000 thanks to rising interest bills on student loans and the controversial tuition fees themselves, which are rising to a maximum of £9250 a year from September.

Back in the early days of the Coalition when fees were trebled to £9000, a broken promise that ex-Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg never really recovered from, the spin from ministers was that the changes would do “more than ever to put students in the driving seat”.

The then Universities and Science Minister David Willetts proclaimed that “universities will be under competitive pressure to provide better quality and at lower cost”.

Sadly, that aspiration looks badly wanting, judging by the findings of a study this week by four academics who made an in-depth study of the teaching of three subjects, physics, economics and history, across more than 60 universities using the Freedom of Information Act.

Their conclusions are pretty bald: “We find that how much teaching students receive is uncorrelated with tuition fees.”

If you’re an economist or a historian compared to a physicist, the chances are you’re getting poor value for money.

The average fees for physics, economics and history across the universities covered by the study are £8740, £8715 and £8887 a year.

But the average physics student gets nearly three times as much teaching as economics students and more than twice as much as historians, according to the academics.

They used the data they gathered to boil down the various methods of teaching (seminars, lectures, laboratory work etc) into a benchmark of “contact hours” between students and teachers, allowing the “teaching intensity” of different universities to be compared.

Within subjects, the differences can be even more stark. Economics students studying at the university with the highest teaching intensity get almost 22 times the tuition given to those studying the subject at the bottom-placed institution, according to the study, which is keeping the names of the universities secret to spare the blushes of the worst performers.