http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4531-0072
![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper analyses data from the National Students Survey, determining which groups of students expressed the greatest levels of satisfaction. We find students registered on clinical degrees and those studying humanities to be the most satisfied, with those in general engineering and media studies the least. We also find contentment to be higher among part-time students, and significantly higher among Russell group and post-1992 universities. We further investigate the sub-areas that drive overall student satisfaction, finding teaching and course organisation to be the most important aspects, with resources and assessment and feedback far less relevant. We then develop a multi-attribute measure of satisfaction which we argue produces a more accurate and more stable reflection of overall student satisfaction than that based on a single question.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Lisa Schopohl for excellent research assistance. We thank seminar participants at the Universities of Reading and Bath for insightful comments. We are grateful for helpful discussions with Cherry Bennett, Maxine Davies, Nathan Helsby, Eileen Hyder and Claire McCullogh. We also thank two anonymous referees, Tony Moore and James Walker for detailed comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
2. This then leads to additional pressure on teaching staff and increases the likelihood that some will leave. Of course, attrition from the teaching staff is not necessarily bad if it injects additional dynamism and energy into the faculty through ‘fresh blood’, but this would also depend on the extent to which departing staff were the weaker members of the team or those with the greatest outside opportunities. In addition, research suggests that academics often work long hours for relatively low pay (Walker et al. Citation2010).
3. For many reasons, recruiting more students following a period of good NSS figures may lead to greater dissatisfaction in the future – not only because there would be more competition to secure jobs, but also since resources are spread more thinly and class sizes increased.
4. Poor satisfaction can result from a mismatch between delivery and expectations in any of these areas but it has been argued that support services are commonly perceived as less satisfactory than the academic aspects of the courses (Kotler and Fox Citation1995).
5. See also Douglas, McClelland and Davies (Citation2008) who investigate student satisfaction using a Critical Incident Technique in order to develop a new model, arguing that ‘service quality is a precursor to student satisfaction’ (21); and Arambewela and Hall (Citation2009) who found that both educational and non-educational factors were significant variables in explaining student satisfaction.
6. H Swain, ‘A hotchpotch of subjectivity’ The Guardian, 19 May 2009.
7. Throughout this paper, we use a range of parametric statistical approaches to the analysis of student satisfaction. However, it is important to note that strictly, the mean of a Likert scale is undefined and therefore one should interpret the statistical inferences undertaken on these variables with caution. We observe, though, that a comparison of the means and of the medians paints a very similar picture. In addition, our unit of analysis is the course or course collection at a particular university and not the individual student scores. As such, all of the satisfaction measures we employ in the database are continuous and no longer on a Likert scale as they are averages, albeit bounded between one and five.
8. It was reported that London Metropolitan and Kingston Universities manipulated the scores at their institutions – see L. Harvey, ‘Jumping through hoops on a white elephant: a survey signifying nothing’ Times Higher Education, 12 June 2008.
9. Naturally, University teachers and administrators may respond to a poor set of NSS scores, although if the concerns of the departing cohort are not consistent with those of the new cohort, there is a danger that such introduced changes may not be welcome.
10. Times Higher Education, 23 July 2015.
11. The NSSE is a US initiative, similar in spirit to the NSS but focused on a smaller number of specific subject areas. The NSSE asks a larger number of more penetrating questions than the NSS concerning the extent to which students have put efforts into their studies and the opportunities to learn that have been made available to them.
12. ‘UK review of information about higher education – National Student Survey – A literature review of survey form and effects’, by DELNI, HEFCE, HEFCW and SFC, 2015.
13. We obtain the data from the Planning Office at our own university, but they are also publicly available from the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s web site: https://www.hefce.ac.uk/lt/nss/results/2015/ .
14. The NSS raw data includes 108 separate degree subject classifications, which is not manageable for analysis and we therefore collect them into cognate groupings according to the 45 ‘cost centres’ reported by HESA.
16. Interestingly, however, the introduction of £9000 fees did not reduce the nationwide percentage of satisfied students, which remained at 86 in both 2014 and 2015 (‘NSS 2015: £9 k tuition fees fail to dent satisfaction’ by C. Haveral, 13 August 2015, Times Higher Education no. 2216).
18. See Gilman (Citation2001) for a discussion of the positive effects of recreation and sports on high school students.
19. In the UK, the Students’ Union has a dual role – both as a political campaigner and activist for student issues locally and nationally, and second, as an organiser and venue for student clubs, societies and entertainment.
20. The reverse problem where students focus on a narrow range of information when answering the survey questions has been termed ‘cherry picking’ – see Callender et al. (Citation2014).
21. Unlike Langan et al., however, we retain Ordinary Least Squares whereas they use the much less well known ‘random forests analysis’ approach.
22. It may be that students are basing their scores on how positive their feedback has been, rather than its quality.
24. It may also be the case that students at elite Universities have much higher expectations due to a sense of entitlement, which may then effect satisfaction scores.
25. The Russell group is a mission group of 24 UK Universities representing what many would consider to be the elite institutions.
26. The University of Huddersfield set, and achieved a target of having 100% of teaching staff being professionally qualified teachers or the equivalent, and at the same time (although no causality can be necessarily inferred) their student satisfaction scores increased.
27. A possible response to this issue while retaining the integrity of the questionnaire would be to randomise the order of the questions.
28. We employ the same weightings as above and apply them to all years, although it would of course be possible to optimise separately for each year.
29. See, for example, the BBC website news article by A. Harrison, 14 March 2013, ‘'Dramatic decline' in part-time university students in England’.
31. Unreported results show that increasing the response rates has a significant positive effect on satisfaction, consistent with the notion that the most aggrieved students are the keenest to complete the survey, while those with more moderate or positive views are more likely to require prompting.
32. Further light could be shed on this by the introduction of entry surveys to measure student expectations of their forthcoming University experience.