Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.
For some time, there has been a broad consensus in the sector that it is not. Evidence supporting this conviction comes from various sources, from official Scottish Funding Council (SFC) reports, analyzes of Scottish university funding by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and budget briefs prepared by university stakeholder groups that representing organizations and staff alike.
So we know there is a gap. But it is important to make it clear that identifying a loophole should not be seen as an indictment of government policy.
This is partly because the Scottish Government provides funding for Scottish students in a variety of ways. The most visible of these is the SFC’s main teaching grant, which includes a basic tuition fee for all Scottish students (£1,820 for first-time undergraduates) and additional funding that varies in value depending on the course of study chosen by a student.
There are also additional sources of public funding, which are not always linked to specific students but are meant to support research or teaching of specific subjects – often referred to as “expensive subjects of strategic importance”. Basically, the government subsidizes students studying more expensive subjects.
But this is why our initial question is so important: nobody knows how much it costs to teach any particular subject. And there is no way to evaluate the adequacy of university funding without having the cost of educating a student as a baseline.
Yet that answer is nearly impossible to find. In fact, it is not in the publicly available financial data.
This is disturbing.
With the higher and further education funding model included in the Scottish Government’s broad reform agenda and the future of free tuition becoming the subject of public and political debate, shouldn’t stakeholders have a common understanding of the cost? How can universities argue that they need more money from the government to cover the cost of teaching without revealing how much they need?
And if there is a continued commitment to free tuition for Scottish students – which almost all political parties and stakeholders have told us they believe in – then any additional funding will come from the Scottish Government and taxpayers. Shouldn’t taxpayers know how much they are being asked to bear?
The fact that all of these conversations are already happening suggests that it shouldn’t take a group of reporters dedicating three weeks of full-time work to try to answer the question at the heart of it all.
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Our struggle to calculate the “cost of a degree” revealed how inaccessible the necessary information is. Each approach we considered had its drawbacks. Part of the complexity stems from a fundamentally good quality, namely that the university sector in Scotland is extremely diverse.
In fact, calling it the university sector is misleading because it implies that institutions provide higher education across various platforms and in completely different financial and operational contexts.
The method we ended up settling on isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the other methods out there.
Firstly, it is based on an official government report and research carried out by financial experts with knowledge of the higher education sector.
Although it relies on research carried out in England, the university sector is comparable across the UK in terms of the basic costs associated with teaching – even if funding models are very different. This is on purpose. It helps to ensure that institutions recognize and enforce teaching and marking standards at the same level and that grades are comparable regardless of which institution awards them – consider that when student work requires an external examiner, the Scottish students can be marked by academics from English universities.
Finally, this method seeks to estimate the cost of teaching specific courses rather than an analysis of what institutions spend on those courses. Arguing over the difference between costs and expenditure may sound like an argument over semantics, but it is crucial.
As one university planner explained, spending can be seen as a reflection of what universities have, not what they need. In the context of this investigation, expenditure is a more subjective measure. For some organisations, it reflects how they can go beyond the standard requirements due to the available surplus. For others, it might reflect making the best of a lack.
A cost estimate, however, is an attempt to put an objective price tag on what universities need to deliver a course effectively, including the necessary resources and staffing.
The results are an approximation of the gap that everyone agrees exists, but has not been quantified. To be clear, we haven’t quantified it either. Instead, we have calculated the difference between what the SFC gives Scottish universities as tuition and what the DfE estimates English universities need to teach the same courses.
We have been clear that our analysis is not prescriptive, but our calculation comes closer to addressing a key question at the heart of the discussions about the future of public funding for universities.
(Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
source link https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24611952.no-one-knows-university-education-costs-problem/?ref=rss
