A 10-year case study on the changing determinants of university student satisfaction in the UK

Abstract

Higher Education (HE), once the prerogative of a tiny elite, is now accessible to larger numbers of people around the world than ever before yet despite the fact that an understanding of student satisfaction has never been more important for today's universities, the concept remains poorly understood. Here we use published data from the UK's National Student Survey (NSS), representing data from 2.3 million full-time students collected from 2007 to 2016, as a case study of the benefits and limitations of measuring student satisfaction that might have applicability for other countries, particularly those that, like the UK, have experienced significant growth in student numbers. The analyses showed that the factor structure of the NSS remained generally stable and that the ability of the NSS to discriminate between different subjects at different universities actually improved over the ten-year sample period. The best predictors of overall satisfaction were 'Teaching Quality' and 'Organisation & Management', with 'Assessment & Feedback' having relatively weak predictive ability, despite the sector's tangible efforts to improve on this metric. The tripling of student fees in 2012 for English students (but not the rest of the UK) was used as a 'natural experiment' to investigate the sensitivity of student satisfaction ratings to the real economic costs of HE. The tuition fee increase had no identifiable negative effect, with student satisfaction steadily improving throughout the decade. Although the NSS was never designed to measure perceived value-for-money, its insensitivity to major changes in the economic costs of HE to the individual suggest that the conventional concept of student satisfaction is incomplete. As such we propose that the concept of student satisfaction: (i) needs to be widened to take into account the broader economic benefits to the individual student by including measures of perceived value-for-money and (ii) should measure students' level of satisfaction in the years post-graduation, by which time they may have a greater appreciation of the value of their degree in the workplace.

Fig 1. Mean student satisfaction measured using the NSS from 2007 to 2016 (averaged over items 1 to 22) in the UK national cohort.

Fig 2. The percentage of variance in NSS scores associated with the subject studied (Subject) and the university attended (University) and their interactions (see Methods for details) for each year from 2007 to 2016.

Fig 3. Heat map showing the mean NSS satisfaction score (averaged over items 1 to 22 in the decade 2007–2016) for the largest 100 HEIs and the 50 most popular subject areas in the UKHE sector.

White squares indicate subjects that are not taught at that university. HEIs and subjects are presented in rank order of their mean NSS scores.

Fig 4. Mean ‘Overall Satisfaction’ for the devolved national undergraduate cohorts (England = high tuition fees; Wales and Northern Ireland Intermediate tuition fees; Scotland. Free tuition fees).

Error bars indicate ±1 standard errors from the mean. Tuition fees were payable throughout the period (except in Scotland) and were increased in 2012, affecting the NSS cohort for the first time in 2015.