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“公共产品”的观点正日益被认为大学是一种服务的观点所取代(奈杜，2003)。其结果是高等教育的“商品化”；即高等教育转变为现在可以“购买”的东西，因此可以将学生转变为消费者。尽管这种转变并不一定是坏事--例如，学生作为消费者比学生作为学习者拥有更大的权力--但一些人表示，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Entwistle的工作来衡量苏格兰罗素集团(Russell Group)三所大学(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(不交学费)和英国国民(自筹资金或申请助学贷款)之间的差异。如果支付学费确实与肤浅的学习方法相关，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.