Interview Transcript

Transcript

Interviewer – Helena Tisthammer.
Subject – Dr Andrew Branch.

Interviewer: Can you just state your name, your position.

Subject: Yes, Doctor Andrew Branch and I teach and research in the area of media and communication at the University of East London.

Interviewer: Great. In your opinion how have tuition fees impacted your lecturing?

Subject: Probably the best way of framing that is to think about the shift that is taken place in terms of the way my relationship with students. So, one tendency has been to conceive of students as customers rather than student, lecture, lecturer relationship. What I mean by that is, it’s just a tendency so its contested, but what I mean by that is that as soon as you start paying for something you think of it as a commodity or you’re invited to think of it as a commodity, so education in this scenario becomes less about a journey of acquiring knowledge and improving one’s understanding of the world and more about purchasing a product from which one expects to tangibly benefit.
I, there were a couple of cavities there, not least to be said tendency so I’m not saying that all students can see for themselves as customers but that’s the shift that’s taking place and that’s the danger in my view of the imposition of fees is it articulates the relationship between lecturer and student.

Interviewer: Do you think the price of education should be free?

Subject: Yes, I do. So linked to what I’ve just said it seems to me that if you want to defend education as a public good as a social good it’s let me just unpacked what I mean by that because I think it’s important to do so. So if we conceive of education as a social good the argument is that you guys as students and are benefitting not just yourselves in terms of developing your knowledge and understanding about the world, but that in turn benefits the wider society so in that sense is a public good. There are all sorts off fringe benefits to that there all sorts of kind of consequences that I’m sure all of this would welcome which is that alongside developing that knowledge of the world one develops the ability to develop a career and to benefit from that carrier and enjoy that career.
But I think that the danger of the imposition of fees is that there’s the that sense of education being defended as a public that becomes more and more difficult and so it becomes that process of commodification and that kind of instrumental way of thinking about education means that the student is invited to conceive of it as a purchase and my fear, or my reservation, is that that sense of it being a kind of social good public good is lost.

Interviewer: Should Universities with a higher ranking have higher tuitions?

Subject: I don’t think universities with a higher ranking should have hung their fees, because I want to question the worth of those rankings in the first place so I think any kind of League table is divisive it creates winners and losers and I’m also not convinced that the metrics that are used to judge those rankings are always helpful and that’s not to say that universities like any other public institution shouldn’t be accountable I think universities have a responsibility to ensure that they are delivering a good service to students adjusting that the way that the metrics arrived at our a problematic and need to be revisited. it seems to main the if anything, and this is a bold claim about making nonetheless, it seems to me that actually institutions that are working with students who have lower grades which of course is a way of ranking students if you like said universities are ranked students are ranked too so if universities like UEL have as part of their mission statement a commitment to widening participation and encouraging students with lower grades to partake in a University experience we should be credited for that and we should be supported in that endeavour so the idea that you could just make this simplistic equation between high achieving students therefore impressive metrics therefore higher fees is an erroneous equation to make and yet it seems to me that we are in danger of heading so there has been a recent report that has been seized by government that basically says that one of the ways in stupid in which students the value of a University experience for students might be measured is to look at the tax returns of those graduates which seems to me really problematic, because one it presumes that the only way that are successful experience could be countified is by salary the salary that you earn. Well, what about if you go into teaching or nursing where you’ve had to acquire some real knowledge and understanding in order to develop that career and yet that’s not going to be reflected in the salary that you earn. Um equally I want to go back to my earlier point which is that there is and there is a version of education experience in education which is that it is it is an end in itself and that is the primary importance.

Interviewer: For international students it is higher price for the higher-ranking University. Do you think that, like, universities like Oxford and Cambridge kinda used our name to get higher tuition?

Subject: I am sure certain institutions do play the market in terms of overseas students this is a personal opinion I say this is as an individual not in terms of representing the institution. I can’t see the justification for that I can see an explanation which is of course you if you play the market you try to arrive at the highest speed that you can with the market will allow but that doesn’t seem to me a position that could be defended if your priority is to deliver education on the basis of the value of their education in and of itself so I personally can’t see justification the reason that that distinction exists is because there’s no cap on international fees those speeds are arrived at institutional level and that is determined by the market by market forces.

Interviewer: What is the effect of increasing fees on both students and institutions?

Subject: So, the effective of teaching in a culture in which students are charged fees is essentially it risks 2 fundamental changes. The first change that it risks implementing is a fundamental change in the relationship between student and lecturer and if the if an earlier version of that relationship is one predicated on being on the sharing of knowledge and development of ideas around importance of that knowledge and how to apply in terms of the social good the danger is that there’s a shift from that relationship to a relationship in which the student conceives of themselves as a customer and the member of staff is invited to conceive of themselves as a deliverer of a product.

Interviewer: Do you want to give a brief history about tuition fees?

Subject: No, no I won’t, I won’t because you know one it will be too long and two, I need to kinda remind myself with a few kinds of key dates.
Just in terms of summary just to kind of bring it to a conclusion. I’m, I’m of the view that actually there can be an experience of higher education that is fulfilling first and foremost because it is about the pursuit of knowledge and about the application of that knowledge but that doesn’t presuppose, I think sometimes the caricatured argument that you have to engage with, that doesn’t presuppose that we can’t as teaching staff already students be sensitive to the other benefits and education affords and those other benefits are about students thinking about future careers, developing their kind of social skills, developing their cultural capital their common knowledge of the world, enjoying the rewards the student experience brings in terms of kind of developing new social relationships and meeting people from different parts of the world. All of those things are kind of fringe benefits and their important benefits and so my own in my own teaching I will always be a pains to support students in any way that are able to but that is always predicated on establishing the most as I see it most important relationship which is there or the most important responsibility I have which is to join impart my knowledge of a particular area my expertise in a particular area and try that impart that in a way where students one they are able to comprehend it and two aim to recognise what could be made of that knowledge how it might be used effectively.