Why 20,000 more students were wrong in 2021 to think they’d get a better education at a Russell Group university
The Russell Group has become a brand, a byword for excellence in UK higher education. Schools use it as a lazy measure of their success. Parents are told that it’s the next best thing to Oxbridge. Students are given to believe that outsiders are second-rate. Second and third division Russell Group universities boast about their membership as a badge of faux elitism.
As someone who has worked in private sector marketing most of his life, I have to confess a guilty respect for how the Russell Group brand has cultivated an impression of overall excellence, when the truth is that it cares much more for research than it does for student education.
This is nowhere more clearly shown than in the rankings produced by the Complete University Guide. Most of the Russell Group’s members rank in the top quartile for their research and in the bottom two quartiles for student satisfaction with their education. With ten members rated Gold for their Teaching Excellence Framework submissions, there’s clearly a chasm between their ability to write a good paper and their commitment to deliver a great student education.
It gets worse. Driven by their need to improve research performance, many Russell Group members are hoovering up more and more students in order to subsidise their research. 20,000 more in 2021 alone. With external funding thin on the ground, tuition income from humanities and social sciences students is being used to pay for the 30% of time that academics are allocated for research.
The conundrum that these universities face is that as they grow into high volume degree factories, so the quality of the student education they offer will continue to decline, and the gap between them and those universities who focus on student education will widen.
Brands have to be built on truths, and the truth is that the Russell Group is a self-selecting cartel of research-intensive universities. If student satisfaction is the closest thing we’ve got to a proxy for quality of student education, then most of their members are woefully under-delivering. The pity is that students only discover this when it’s too late.
It's time to challenge misperceptions, starting by publishing a new university league table based entirely on how existing students rate their current education. A customer rating if you like, though most academics will hate that word. Maybe it should be published on a new site, student-rated-universities.com. Student Satisfaction ranking is based on three factors which are then amalgamated: satisfaction with course, teaching and feedback. Oxford and Cambridge do not report on these factors.
St Andrews and Loughborough are the only two high ranking British universities which also rank highly on student satisfaction. Of the total 130 institutions ranked, only one Russell Group university, York, ranks higher than 50th on the same measure.
|
All UK universities |
Student Satisfaction Ranking |
Russell Group Universities |
Student Satisfaction Ranking |
|
St Andrews |
1 |
York |
44 |
|
Aberystwyth |
2 |
Warwick |
50= |
|
Abertay |
3 |
Sheffield |
50= |
|
Arts, Bournemouth |
4= |
Glasgow |
58 |
|
West London |
4= |
Exeter |
65= |
|
Wales Trinity |
6 |
Liverpool |
65= |
|
Plymouth Marjon |
7= |
Southampton |
65= |
|
Bolton |
7= |
Durham |
70 |
|
Newman |
7= |
Imperial |
87 |
|
Loughborough |
7= |
LSE |
91 |
|
Robert Gordon |
7= |
Leeds |
96= |
|
Bristol West of Eng. |
12 |
Bristol |
96= |
|
Buckingham |
13 |
Newcastle |
99 |
|
Chichester |
14 |
UCL |
104= |
|
Staffordshire |
15= |
Manchester |
104= |
|
York St John |
15= |
Queen's Belfast |
108= |
|
Worcester |
15= |
Nottingham |
108= |
|
Glyndwr |
15= |
Cardiff |
108= |
|
Harper Adams |
19= |
Birmingham |
116 |
|
Lincoln |
19= |
Edinburgh |
122= |
|
Solent |
21= |
Queen Mary |
122= |
|
Bishops Grosseteste |
21= |
Kings College |
124 |
Source: Complete University Guide 2022
Despite the recent progress made by Oxford and Cambridge especially, much of British higher education remains a reflection of our class-dominated society. The Russell Group is its physical embodiment. A group formed in 1994 as a self-protecting reaction to the government’s decision two years earlier to allow polytechnics to call themselves universities. A group where many academics still look down on vocational education and consider themselves superior to their colleagues on teaching-only contracts. A group in short where student education plays second fiddle to academic research.
The additional 20,000 students didn’t know this when they selected Russell Group universities last year. With their inflated teacher-assessed grades, they probably thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.
Future generations of students need to be able to make much more informed choices.