Study on tuition fees rise unveiled at Teaching & Learning Conference

The rise in university tuition fees has changed students' academic performance significantly, a study co-authored by a UCL academic has found.

Dr Parama Chaudhury, a senior teaching fellow at UCL's Department of Economics, conducted the study with colleagues Lorenzo Lotti (University of Genoa) and Sefi Roth (London School of Economics). She discussed the findings at UCL's Teaching and Learning Conference on Tuesday.

The academics analysed data on students' background and performance to see whether students worked harder when their degrees cost more and how a rise in fees affected how well they did. The academics used the increase in fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in 2012 for home and European Union students in England as their point of comparison.

The study found that first year students' average marks rose by more than one percentage point after the fee rise, while for students in their final year, average marks fell by almost four percentage points. The effect was on the whole more marked among men.

Dr Chaudhury said: "We found that in the first year, academic performance improves with higher fees, second year performance remains the same, while in the final year, it worsens. Given the weighting of each year in the final degree class, this implies that students perform worse in the degree overall."

She said it could be that the "price shock" effect was largest for those just starting university. As students were nearer to graduating, the need to pay back university loans and to look for a job distracted from the effort they put into their studies.

"One obvious difficulty is establishing that higher fees actually caused changes in student behaviour," Dr Chaudhury said. "The make-up of the student body, the set-up of the university, the organisation of modules and so on may have changed post fees-rise .... In order to establish causality, we note that any post-fee rise change in these factors should affect both domestic and overseas students ... so any difference in domestic students' outcomes before and after the fee rise relative to overseas students indicates a causal effect of higher fees."

The academics found no little difference before and after the fee rise between the make-up of home students compared to their overseas peers or their choices of degree.

"Our study shows that the fee rise has affected student behaviour whilst in university and while there is a positive effect on academic outcomes at first, the overall effect is negative," Dr Chaudhury said. "This may justify greater government subsidisation of fees, or other assistance to mitigate the negative effects in the final year of university."

The authors are working on publishing the full study over the coming months.

The presentation was just one of more than 100 at UCL's annual Teaching and Learning Conference on Wednesday.

The conference, now in its fourth year, hosted more than 600 participants - including a record number of students.

At one point, the conference was the highest trending event in London on Twitter and had tweets from, among other countries, Brazil, Turkey and the US.

Participants could choose to hear presentations on topics as diverse as race and student-teacher relations, how to prevent plagiarism and how to help postgraduates prepare for the workplace. A record 22 of the presentations were from students - signalling a shift in culture towards more of a partnership between staff and students than in the past.

The conference was organised by UCL's Centre for Advancing Learning and Teaching.