Variable tuition fees: widening participation and institutional marketing strategies.
Dr Colin McCaig
Centre for Research and Evaluation
SheffieldHallamUniversity
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006
Introduction
The English unitary higher education system comprises three major types of higher education institution (HEI): pre-1992 universities, post-1992 universities (formerly polytechnics) and specialist colleges of higher education. Therefore within the system there is wide range of HE experience on offer, and differentiation is crucial to institutional identity in a ever more competitive marketplace. This paper argues that two recent policy agendas, the drive towards widening participation in access to higher education (WP) and the introduction of variable (‘top-up’) tuition fees, have meant that marketing strategies have become more important than ever. Philosophically, the two policy agendas differ markedly. State funded widening participation policies such as the Aimhigher programme encourage collaboration between HE institutions by focussing on generic aspiration raising among underrepresented groups, regardless of location or institution. By contrast, official Access Agreements lodged with the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) are competitive marketing tools which outline the way individual institutions will spend the additional fee income on underrepresented groups that they wish to enrol. The interplay of these policy agendas expose marketing strategies and allows us to conclude by developing emergent institutional typologies for discussion.
This paper draws on findings from two recent pieces of research: a content analysis of a sample of twenty OFFA access agreements (carried out by the author); and a survey of all English higher education institutions engaged with Aimhigher on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE: 2006)[1]. The main focus of the paper is the content of the access agreements: in marketing terms they offer three kinds of differentiation: price (bursaries and other support); content (the outreach on offer); and positionality (competing conceptions of quality and inclusion).
The content of the sample agreements (ten from each of the pre-1992 and post-1992 university categories) are then analysed in relation to institutional responses to the survey of educational providers in 2005 about the impact of Aimhigher. Referring to the survey findings allow us to compare institutional WP policies and practices relating to the priority groups engaged with, activities engaged in and partnership working, in two distinct WP arenas.
We will conclude that HEIs typically used the opportunity provided by OFFA to outline their ‘unique selling points’ as, alternatively, 'selectors' of the brightest academic students from poor backgrounds, or 'recruiters' offering new HE opportunities for all available talents and for the wider good of the labour market. The sample agreements offer a wide variation in what institutions offer in terms of financial support and recruitment opportunities. Clearly, they are not all operating in the same segment of the market, and this paper goes on to develop four typologies (or ideal types) of marketing behaviour that illustrate the type of message institutions want to portray and the potential students they want to attract. These typologies reflect the fact that institutions are not all working from the same assumptions of what widening participation and inclusion means, either for their own interests or the interests of society in general.
Background
Until 1992, England had a binary system of higher education, with autonomous universities engaged in research and the teaching of degrees on one side, and polytechnics, mainly engaged in the teaching of vocational degrees, higher national certificates and diplomas (HNCs and HNDs) and other sub-degree qualifications, on the other. The polytechnics formed a public sector of higher education, funded by Local Educational Authorities (LEAs) and responsive to the needs of the labour market, but without the authority to award their own degrees. As labour market demand for higher education qualifications increased, it was the polytechnic sector that responded with new qualifications, curricula and modes of teaching, while the universities were left free to concentrate on scholarly research and the teaching of high prestige academic degrees. However, demand for more higher education at degree level eventually led to the development of polytechnics with institutional missions similar to some universities, and in 1992 the clamour for parity was addressed by legislation which allowed polytechnics to become universities with degree-awarding powers. Partly because of this new unitary landscape, market differentiation between HE institutions became even more important during the 1990s. At the same time the political, social and economic necessity to widen participation led to the new Labour government after 1997 declaring a target of attaining a 50% participation rate among young people between the ages of 18-30 by 2010.
In 1999 the UK government (via HEFCE) required all HEIs to issue statements outlining what they were doing to widen participation and why. In 2001 HEIs were asked for widening participation strategies that set out plans, targets and activities to be undertaken during 2001-2004. Changes to the funding of higher education announced in the White Paper The Future of Higher Education (DfES, 2003) and the introduction of the requirement for access agreements lodged with OFFA exposed competition in the form of bursaries and incentives to attract students from underrepresented groups. Access agreements therefore provided an opportunity for HEIs to differentiate themselves in the market: in the case of pre-1992 universities' agreements, this provided an opportunity for them to underline their emphasis on high entry requirements; for post-1992 universities, an opportunity to market themselves as providers of opportunities for all.
Access Agreements
The sample of twenty access agreement amounts to approximately 25% of each of the pre-1992 and post-1992 university categories[2]. HEIs submitting the agreements were weighed to take into account geographical spread, size (measured by student numbers[3]) and with regard to maintaining a balance between institutions based in large urban conurbations and those based in provincial cities.
Access agreements explain what institutions will do in exchange for being allowed to charge the new £3000 per annum tuition fee. They are designed to cover up to five years from 2006/07 and as such are meant to be forward looking documents rather than historical statements of record. The documents have two main purposes: firstly they outline what combination of bursaries and other financial support is offered to students to offset the increased fee; secondly, they outline their institutional widening participation or outreach activities and priorities. OFFA guidance notes state that:
Institutions are required to use some of the money raised through tuition fees to provide bursaries or other financial support for students from under-represented groups, or to fund outreach activities to encourage more applications from under-represented groups. An access agreement will provide the details of bursary support and outreach work. (OFFA, 2005)
The amount or proportion of additional fee income to be spent was not prescribed, but it was noted that: “institutions whose record suggests that they have further to go in attracting a wider range of applications will be expected to be more ambitious in their access agreement” (OFFA, 2005). This paper aims to determine whether institutions have in fact chosen to be more ambitious in their efforts to attract a wider range of applicants or merely used the Access Agreement as an opportunity to highlight what they have done and will continue to do.
OFFA access agreements vary by length and by content. The ten pre-1992 universities’ access agreements average 16.3 pages per document, while the ten post-1992 universities’ average 8.9 pages. Pre-1992 universities’ access agreements are more like to include annexes (by a ratio of 7-2) and more likely to include a ‘mission statement’ (4-3) but are less likely than post-1992 universities to include a section outlining their institutional values (2-7). Overall, post-1992 universities’ access agreements devote a slightly higher proportion of their wordage to describing their mission/values (5.7% as opposed to 4.2%).
I. Bursaries and other financial support
There was a wide variation in the bursaries offered and other additional scholarships and discretionary support among our sample agreements. Most HEIs also declared some courses exempt from the new fee regime. Although the proportion of additional spending was not prescribed there was a high degree of unanimity among those HEIs that did choose to reveal the total percentage of additional fee income they planned to spend on bursaries and outreach. Among both pre-92 and post-92 universities six out of the ten sample agreements declared this information. Some agreements specified additional expenditure in monetary terms and were thus not available for comparison; others chose to outline additional fee expenditure percentages costs on bursaries and outreach separately, while others chose to offer a combined percentage. Table 1 combines all the available information for comparison: as we can see even with the lowest pre-1992 university as an outlier the average percentage outlays are very close.
Figure 1: Declared additional fee income expenditure by HEI type
Range / Pre-1992 / Post-1992Highest / 33% / 36%
Lowest / 14% / 25%
Average / 27.5% / 29.3%
Bursaries were calculated in one of three ways; either on the basis of receipt of varying levels of Higher Education Maintenance Grant (HEMG); on a calculation of the family’s Household Residual Income (HRI); or a combination of both (for academic year 2006/07 the full HEMG is £2,700, awarded to those whose HRI is £15,200 or less). In the most common variant the HEMG was used as the basic qualifier with gradations based on variable HRI. In other agreements gradations were based on variable HEMG or variable HRI. Bursaries using the HEMG scale offered more to those awarded the full HEMG than to those not qualifying for the full HEMG. The household residual income scale operates on an upward sliding scale; the lower the HRI the greater the bursary.
Figure 2: Qualifier ready reckoner
Qualifier / Level of BursaryHigher HEMG / Higher
Lower HEMG / Lower
Higher HRI / Higher
Lower HRI / Lower
We can see the distribution of bursary qualifiers is roughly the same for both HEI types. In addition, two pre-1992 universities made their bursaries partially contingent on high prior achievement which had encouraged application to elite institutions and one post-1992 university declared a reduced bursary for students enrolled on Foundation Year, HND and Fd courses.
Figure 3: Distribution of bursary qualifiers by HEI type
Bursary qualifier / Pre-1992 / Post-1992 / TotalHEMG only / 2 / 3 / 5
HEMG with HRI gradations / 5 / 5 / 10
HRI only / 3 / 2 / 5
Total / 10 / 10 / 20
Figure 4 shows that in terms of monetary value the range of bursaries offered by pre-1992 universities was wider than those offered by post-1992 universities. Among pre-1992 universities the bursary range was from zero to £5,000, among post-1992 universities from £50 to £2,150. While the figure of £5,000 was well above the pre-1992 universities’ norm it does not disguise the fact that pre-1992 universities offer higher bursaries than post-1992 universities. However it should be noted that because the proportion of beneficiaries is not declared in access agreements this may reflect pre-1992 universities targeting more generous support at fewer potential students and post-1992 universities spreading the money more thinly among a larger cohort. Among pre-1992 universities the average upper limit is £2,165 compared to £885 for post-1992 universities. However, the lower limit average shows that post-1992 universities are slightly more generous at £475 compared to £470 offered by pre-1992 universities.
Figure 4: Range of bursaries
Bursary range / Pre-1992 / Post-1992Upper range maximum / £5000 / £2150
Upper range average / £2165 / £885*
Lower range average / £470 / £475*
Lower range minimum / 0 / £50
* three post-1992 universities did not offer a range but a fixed amount for all qualifying students.
Additional scholarships and discretionary support
Additional scholarships were usually offered contingent on excellence, applications to shortage subjects or were reserved for students coming from partner institutions. There were also discretionary offers of support, usually on the basis of age, (i.e. mature students) having dependents, being in financial hardship or demonstrating potential. Support was also extended to students on non-degree qualifications, e.g. post-graduate teaching certificates (PGCEs) and sub-degree higher national diplomas (HNDs) and Foundation degrees (Fds).
Figure 5: Additional financial support categories by HEI type
Additional support / Category / Pre-1992 / Post-1992 / TotalScholarships / Shortage subjects / 3 / 2 / 5
Excellence/merit based / 2 / 1 / 3
Partnership/local colleges / 3 / 3 / 6
Progression linked / 2 / 2
Discretionary support / Mature students / 1 / 2 / 3
Those with dependents / 1 / 1
Financial hardship / 2 / 1 / 3
Those with potential / 2 / 1 / 2
Non-degree / PGCE / 1 / 1
HND/Fd / 2 / 2
Total / 15 / 13 / 28
Note that the totals add up to more than one category of additional support per institution; the number of categories ranged from zero to six. Five access agreements offered no additional support, one from a pre-1992 university and four from post-1992 universities. One pre-1992 university offered three categories of additional support, while one post-1992 university offered six. As with bursaries, pre-1992 universities seemed to be more generous, although because of the qualifying clauses and the limited (and sometimes means tested) nature of some of the additional scholarships support it is impossible to quantifiably compare the different levels of support available.
Fee exemptions
The majority of the HEI sample also offered full or partial fee exemptions for a variety of reasons, and in one case the fee exemption was offset by the withdrawal of the bursary offer during the exemption period. Overall half the pre-1992 universities and nine out of ten post-1992 universities offered some kind of fee exemption. Again the post-1992 universities offered a larger range and total number of exemption categories.
Figure 6: Fee exemption categories by HEI type
Category of exemption / Pre-1992 / Post-1992 / TotalPlacement year students / 2 / 3 / 5
Part-time students / 2 / 2 / 4
Pre-entry (Access course, FY or Y0) / 2 / 3 / 5
Non-degree (PGCE, HND, Fd) / 2 / 3 / 5
Aimhigher/Progression related / 1 / 1
Based off-campus, satellite college / 1 / 2 / 3
Subject specific / 3 / 2 / 5
Total / 12 / 16 / 28
Evidence from the bursary and finance section of the agreements suggests that pre-1992 universities tend to offer larger bursaries and more generous additional support but to fewer potential students given that they are less incentivised to increase student numbers. Indeed they appear to be reacting to government funding priorities that have offered WP incentives (i.e. financial premia for accepting able students from underrepresented groups, Lewis: 2002: 210) at the expense of other potential students (Palfreyman: 2004, Saunders: 2004). We can hypothesise that pre-1992 universities use access agreements as a means of reinforcing their brand image as selective institutions with high entry standards, but generous enough to offer bursaries to applicants from poor and underrepresented groups. Meanwhile the post-1992 universities use WP funding to increase student numbers which they do by offering courses, programmes and awards that are attractive to a wider cohort of potential students, often without traditional entry qualifications and that had not considered themselves HE material.
The next section looks at the evidence provided the outreach programmes and projects offered in access agreements and the groups engaged with, and these findings are compared (where appropriate) to institutional responses to the 2005 Aimhigher survey. We have to be careful when making direct comparisons here because, as noted in the introduction, OFFA access agreements are designed to illustrate how institutions would spend any additional fee income on their particular WP priorities, while the Aimhigher survey asked, in the main, about engagement in collaborative Aimhigher activities. Aimhigher is never the sum total of an institutions’ WP activities and often involves subsuming institutional interests within wider regional priorities identified at partnership level. The comparison remains useful, however, for developing institutional trends and WP typologies.
II. Widening participation outreach activities
This section looks in detail at the outreach work carried out by HEIs, the groups engaged with, the level and focus of activities and the references to institutional relationships and partnerships alluded to in access agreements. It looks at the evidence that suggests institutions are either building on present strengths or planning to correct previous imbalances in their recruitment procedures vis-à-vis underrepresented groups (as OFFA directed). Some of this material is to be found in the values’ section of the agreement rather than in the lists of outreach activities and declared priorities and is qualitative by nature and therefore not always statistically/financially comparable. However, such information that is openly declared and can be quantified from the access agreements is outlined below.
Engagement: target age groups
Engagement is used here in the sense of engagement with a target social group that is the subject of outreach or widening participation activity. Analysis of engagement with age groups in our sample of access agreements reveals that pre-1992 universities are more likely than post-1992 universities to cite primary school pupils aged 5-11 as a group they engage with. Secondary age pupils (11-16) are the focus of more of pre-1992 universities’ attention, but in this as in the other age categories, post-1992 universities are more likely to cite engagement with this age group in the document; overall pre-1992 universities engage with an average of 1.9 different age groups while post-1992 universities engage with an average of 3.1 age groups (Table I).
Table I: Age groups engaged by HEI type
Age groups / Pre-1992 / Post-1992 / TotalPrimary 5-11 / 5 / 2 / 7
Secondary 11-16 / 7 / 10 / 17
Young People 16-19 / 3 / 9 / 12
Adults 20-30 / 0 / 3 / 3
Adults 31+ / 0 / 3 / 3
Mature students / 4 / 4 / 8
Total / 19 / 31 / 50
The Aimhigher survey (HEFCE: 2006, Table 2.3.1) did not represent widely different findings by age group. Post-1992 universities focused slightly more strongly on the older age groups, and also reported more work with primary age children than the access agreements analysis suggests.