If students think that they’ve made the wrong choice – either of course, university or both – depending on how deep in they are, there’s often not much that can be done.
That’s a problem – one that has appeared to be considerable in successive waves of the HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey, despite higher education policy in the last decade supposedly making it both easier to choose, and easier to switch.
“Regret” in the SAES – measured by asking students if they had a second chance to start again, knowing what they know now, what they would do, has been running at between 35 and 42 per cent since 2018.
The pandemic will have hit that – but it’s still a large proportion of (in this case) undergraduates given that most of them will be paying for those decisions for decades to come.
To work out what to do about it, we’d need research on what lies behind the figures – and now a research collaboration between Bristol University, HEPI and Advance HE (along with a steering group including UCAS and UCL’s COSMO project) has produced some – all under the careful eye of former Office for Students CEO turned Professor of Practice in Higher Education Policy, Nicola Dandridge.
Via two surveys, each of 2,000 students (one for students and graduates), The benefits of hindsight tells us only 2-3 per cent felt higher education was the wrong path altogether – it’s the choices within that that are the issue.
Similar (enough) to the SAES, 65 per cent of undergraduates were happy with their institution and course choices. 10 per cent would study the same subject at a different university, 6 per cent would change courses at the same institution, 6 per cent would do both, and the rest would have preferred an apprenticeship, a gap year, or direct employment.
If you’re thinking that that would improve post-graduation, there’s bad news – only 48 per cent of graduate respondents (aged 25-30) were happy with their original decisions, while 15 per cent would have chosen a different course at the same institution, 11 per cent the same course elsewhere, and 12 per cent both – with a further 8 per cent wishing they’d chosen an apprenticeship.
Why? Students primarily cited “happiness” and better “fit” as reasons for wanting different choices, with 40 per cent acknowledging insufficient research. Graduates, unsurprisingly, were more concerned with career opportunities, with a similar percentage suggesting they needed better career guidance.
Under the microscope there are two things – the structures and support for choice, and the structures and support for transfer. Neither come out well.
I travelled each and every highway
The report kicks off with some historical and international comparisons.
A HEFCE report from 2016 surveyed graduates 3.5 years after graduation and found 32 per cent would have chosen a different subject, 21 per cent a different institution with ethnic minority graduates most likely to express choice regret.
International surveys show varying levels of choice satisfaction – 83 per cent of Irish students and 73 per cent of Dutch students report they’d have chosen the same institution or program again.
OfS analysis from 2021 suggested that less than 3 per cent transfer to different providers (with fewer than half transferring credits), and a 2016 DfE study said that 23 per cent of students who changed providers found the process difficult or very difficult. The data stopped being returned in September 2021 when DfE asked the OfS to stop in the interests of reducing burden.
Anyway, the results. Among those who would have made different choices, 85 per cent say they would have made a significant difference in their lives, with regret increasing by year of study – 25 per cent of first-years versus 41 per cent of third-years.
Satisfaction varied by region too – 74 per cent in Scotland vs. 64 per cent in England – as well as by subject, health related students were 10 points happier than social science students.
For graduates, those employed in highly skilled occupations or pursuing further education reported greater satisfaction with their choices than those in less skilled positions or unemployed.
You can read all of that, along with various other splits by region, stage and so on, in two ways – either a lot of regret isn’t about the course at all, or a lot of it is about the extent to which a student believed a course might set them up for the labour market, and then (at least a few years on), failed.
Cracked up to be
The focus group findings fill in some of the statistical blanks. Learning-related concerns were prominent – with students expressing disappointment about course content, teaching quality, and facilities. One lamented inadequate professional knowledge development:
I found that the knowledge they had to offer, the experiences of the tutors themselves, and the actual equipment and facilities weren’t that great.
Many noted discrepancies between university marketing and reality, with one observing:
I think the way that it was sold is not quite exactly how it is now.
Resource constraints were also cited, with one student describing how financial issues at their university led to their course being “gutted” with many modules eliminated.
Career limitations emerged as another regret, particularly among STEM graduates struggling to find employment. One explained her degree’s narrow academic focus rather than industry-relevant skills, and cost of living concerns also featured, with one student regretting moving to Bristol, which they discovered was:
…the second most expensive for rent outside of London.
And as seen in studies on value for money (not least the one commissioned by Nicola Dandridge when OfS was set up), financial pressures intensified students’ critical assessment of their education:
The fact that I’m so aware of the cost of it makes me think more critically.
Much of that intensifies in the graduate results. Career limitations emerge as a dominant theme – with many lamenting overly specialized degrees that restrict employment options:
I regret the course that I picked: it’s too specialised. It has limited where I can work – I can work on a children’s ward and nothing else.”
Several pointed to insufficient internship opportunities as hindering their career progression. One theatre studies graduate wished that employability had been emphasised more – another regretted not completing a placement year.
Making good choices
On the assumption that getting the choice right to start with would have helped, for those in the regret camp, 41 per cent of undergraduates thought they should have researched more themselves.
Students reported universities presenting misleading information at open days and in prospectuses, failing to provide detailed module information, and “putting on a show” that didn’t accurately reflect the actual experience.
External pressures also significantly influenced regretted decisions with many students choosing subjects based on parental expectations rather than personal interests. Cultural expectations – particularly pronounced among Asian students – and social pressures prevented students from exploring alternatives.
Preparing for exams whilst decision making also compromised decision quality – many selected “safer” universities based on predicted grades rather than aspirations. Timing was also a key factor in regretted decisions.
Many wished they had taken gap years to gain clarity on their goals and undergraduates regretted looking “backwards” at subjects they enjoyed in school rather than “forwards” to potential careers. Graduates particularly lamented not understanding the labour market, wishing they better understood the importance of work experience and placements.
Students who regretted their choices identified some things that could have helped – more transparent information about course content, better integrated career guidance, “taster courses” allowing students to experience subjects before committing, and targeted support for first-generation students.
But 37 per cent of undergraduates and 21 per cent of graduates believed nothing would have enabled them to make different decisions – social, family, or educational influences overwhelming whatever agency they thought they should have had.
I did what I had to do
If students do get their choice wrong, one of the solutions – at least one promoted heavily in the last decade and the now largely abandoned duties given to the Office for Students in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 – is transfer.
And interestingly, the majority who regretted their choices would have transferred to another course or institution if possible – 59 per cent of undergraduates and 63 per cent of graduates.
But multiple barriers prevented it – nearly half of undergraduates believed transferring wasn’t worth the effort and disruption. 52 per cent of graduates said a lack of information or support was their primary barrier, and many (38 per cent of graduates, 22 per cent of undergraduates) were completely unaware that transferring was an option.
Additional barriers included financial concerns, poor timing (realizing too late), and family pressures.
Students and graduates identified two major factors that would have enabled transfers – better information and guidance and financial support.
Many also suggested early intervention systems – first-month “grace periods,” independent advisors, and regular check-ins with first-year students – to identify dissatisfaction before students became too established to transfer easily.
But again, a significant minority (23 per cent undergraduates, 19 per cent graduates) believed nothing could have enabled them to transfer regardless of support offered.
There’s some interesting demographic and characteristics splits. Students from lower participation areas reported their choices having greater consequences, higher proportions of private school students wished they attended different institutions for different courses, and Asian students were more influenced by university rankings but less by social media and career advisors.
Worryingly disabled students showed significantly higher rates of regret and a stronger desire to transfer than the average. Focus group participants highlighted late diagnosis of neurodiversity, or a lack of disability support.
I planned each charted course
You do wonder whether, knowing what they know now, having looked at the results, the team would have chosen a different set of questions. What the results tell us is a lot that we already know – both about how students choose a course and university, and how they evaluate the value of that experience.
If anything, the problem is the paradigm – the assumption in the hypothesis being that students either need to make the right choice first time, or that they need to be able to transfer if they don’t.
Insofar as the research tests the central solutions to potential regret in both Students at the Heart of the System from 2011 and the OfS (F2) duty to facilitate transfer required via the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, it’s pretty clear that those solutions have failed.
As such, we might expect the potential solutions on offer to at least contemplate something more radical than “do those things only better.”
Sadly not. Students should conduct more comprehensive research earlier and consider gap years; schools should shift focus from university attendance to appropriate course/institution matching; graduate perspectives are to be incorporated into school career guidance; and universities are mildly exhorted to make sure that information is “accurate and realistic,” eradicating any “blur” with marketing and promotional material. Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, work-related learning and the embedding of employability in the curriculum should be “scaled up in universities,” information and guidance should be available and accessible to students to support transfer arrangements, and consideration should be given to UCAS playing a “greater and more visible central coordinating function” in supporting students who wish to transfer.
If none of that feels like it will shift the dial, that’s perhaps because there’s a dead-horse flogging aspect to them – coupled with nothing in the report that recognises the lack of incentives on universities to make much of that happen. It’s perhaps in the lone recommendation on the LLE that some better solutions might be found.
I ate it up and spit it out
Some of the material from students in the report looks at the balance between the theoretical and the practical, and some at (over) specialisation. Both point clearly to programme design, and flexibility within it – at just the point that providers are busy ripping choices and pathways out in favour of more efficient core module credit.
As Jim noted in this piece on marketisation, it’s the opposite that students want – both in terms of majors and minors, and students being able to accrue credit for learning outside of their subject area through work and service.
Clear signals to that end in the LLE would help – as would some actual rights in that space over credit transfer and accumulation. Providers that don’t want to play ball don’t have to be able to access the student finance system.
We note, for example, that in Poland students have the actual right between 25 and 30 per cent of their credit as optional, non-core. In Latvia the minister is about to afford students the right to accrue credit across universities. In Austria, course reps have the right to input on and sign off on a programme’s electives before they are finalised for the year ahead, and in plenty of countries the right to accrue credit for learning via work and service is enshrined.
More broadly, the lack of student rights in general in the UK – and the lack of a role for student organisations in promoting and enforcing them – is also a barrier. This kind of stuff isn’t going to happen by asking nicely. And the mis-selling thing is only going to change if, for example, OfS applies that new fairness condition to everyone, and strengthens students’ confidence to complain.
Some of the material is about age – and I’m reminded that across the OECD, the UK has pretty much the youngest entrants and youngest Bachelor’s graduates. The first of those is about everyone in the system normalising a pause – the second is about a credit and student finance system that allows pauses, setbacks, reductions in study intensity and other wheezes that would prevent a student from thinking that they weren’t able to experience what they wanted through no fault of their own.
Naturally, the stuff on costs needs tightening up – the woeful state of information that both encourages fiscal illusions and reduces any effort in getting those costs down – and the idea that rent or other participation costs can’t be properly researched at least at subject level through some of the national survey infrastructure that we have now is endlessly frustrating. The fact that the UK is one of the few countries in Europe where students have to keep paying their rent if they’ve dropped out means that bigger structural solutions are required.
There are some ironies in the incentives currently hurled at universities that the report misses too. Anyone that thinks that regret, as described here, will improve while OfS is dangling damocles over continuation is naive; anyone that thinks that similar stats for PG would be improved when our “big sell” is getting a Master’s done in a year and UKVI looks down on changing course, is also kidding themselves. And a student finance system that continues to treat adults as dependent (the means test in the maintenance loan) almost guarantees that parents will hold more sway than their children.
But as we talked about at The Secret Life of Students, reimagining what “full-time” study means in an era when most students must work to survive is arguably the most important task. If we force students to choose between earning, learning, and contributing, there’s going to be regret – over “fit” and happiness, work experience, skills acquisition and the inability to stop and think in general.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but foresight is better. Unless central government sets itself the task of slowing down both the initial choice and the experience itself – supported by a framework of structural change and actual student agency – we expect that the relentless efficiency demanded of both students and their universities in a mass system will continue to overwhelm whatever OfS does on DiscoverUni or whatever providers think a lonely webpage is doing on the facilitation of transfer.