Your Money's Worth: How Fees Affect Students' Approaches to Employability and University

无论是在政策上还是在实践中，高等教育作为一种“公共产品”的观念正日益被大学作为一种服务的观点所取代（Naidoo, 2003）。其结果就是所谓的高等教育“商品化”；也就是说，高等教育转变为可以“购买”的东西，从而可以将学生转变为消费者。虽然这种转变并不一定是坏事——例如，作为消费者的学生比作为学习者的学生拥有更多的权力——但一些人认为，学生越来越多地要求大学提供更多的“价值”，这可能会导致一种更被动的学习方式。因此，我的研究将使用恩特威斯尔的工作来衡量苏格兰三所罗素集团大学（爱丁堡、圣安德鲁斯和格拉斯哥）本科生的学习方法，并使用定量分析技术比较苏格兰国民（不支付学费）和英国国民（自费或有学生贷款）之间的差异。如果付费确实与表面的学习方法相关，那么其影响是重大的，特别是在政策制定者继续提高英国大学学费的情况下。

The idea of higher education as a "public good" is increasingly being replaced by the view of university as a service (Naidoo, 2003), both in policy and in practise. The result is what has been described as the "commodification" of higher education; i.e. the transformation of HE as something that can now be 'bought', and which can therefore turn the student into a consumer. Though this transformation is not necessarily bad - the studentas- consumer has more power, for example, than the student-as-learner - some have suggested that students are increasingly demanding more "value" from the universities, and that this may lead to a more passive approach to learning. My research will therefore use the work of Entwistle to measure the approaches to learning of undergraduates at three Russell Group Universities in Scotland (Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Glasgow), and compare the differences between Scottish nationals (who do not pay fees) and UK nationals (who are either self-funded or who have taken out student loans) using quantitative analysis techniques. If fee-paying is indeed correlated with a surface approach to learning, then the implications are significant, especially as policy-makers continue to raise tuition fees for universities in the UK.