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

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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.