There’s a broadly-drawn equation that seems to underpin a lot of sector strategic thinking.
Common sense suggests that as a provider you improve the student experience by investing in academic staff.
A provider – indeed a subject area at a provider, as we know there is a subject effect on student satisfaction – offering a student experience involving packed lecture theatres and sporadic supervision will be perceived as less satisfying than smaller classes, seminars, tutorials, and individual support.
Everyone believes this. But it doesn’t appear to be true.
Plotting student:staff ratio against NSS fails to show even a non-significant relationship between satisfaction and staff numbers. Looking primarily at NSS question 15 (which relates to the ease of contacting teaching staff and seems most likely to see an impact from staff student ratios) there are no clear relationships between our two variables in any subject area. Clearly this is a data combination that is indicative at best (see the caveats below) but the absence of any visible relationship at all is remarkable.
Neither does there appear to be any relationship between the size of a department (in student numbers) and satisfaction – you would expect, perhaps, to see large departments with many hundreds of students making it harder for students to contact staff in a meaningful way.
