Slowly but surely, we’re starting to get a picture of the ways in which the cost of living crisis is impacting student engagement, mental health and experience – with the impacts manifesting as much more pronounced in different parts of the sector for different groups.
Adding to the pile of evidence that the Department for Education and its counterparts around the devolved nations seem routinely determined to ignore comes this year’s iteration of the HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey, now in its eighteenth year.
There’s an attempt at some averages good news – perception of receiving good or very good value-for-money has risen slightly, although not statistically significantly, and still only on 37 per cent. The proportion of students whose experience exceeded expectations increased from 17 per cent to 19 per cent – again not much to write home about, not where we were pre-pandemic, and discounting Covid on a serious and sustained long-term decline from 32 per cent in 2013.
As ever it’s a big survey – 10,163 full-time undergrads responded, and all the right weightings have been applied to questions on familiar questions on value-for-money, assessment, volumes of teaching hours and experience compared to expectations, as well as new questions on the impact of cost of living and paid employment. Here we’ve pulled out many of the toplines from the report, as well as plenty you won’t find in the narrative that are hiding in the data tables.
