Sheffield SU threatens to sabotage National Student Survey over new proposals

Sheffield Student’s Union is planning to sabotage the NSS (National Student Survey) over government plans to raise tuition fees for institutions which score highly in their surveys.

The National Student Survey is a yearly questionnaire carried out by students up and down the country,  and asks the students about the quality of teaching at their university.

This data is then passed on to government bodies to analyse, but the government announced that those universities with better teaching standards will be allowed to raise tuition fees above the current £9,000 p/a maximum.

Minesh Parekh, the current education officer at Sheffield Student’s Union, is planning to dismantle the survey by refusing to use their metrics in the questionnaire, instead using artificial minimum and maximum scores, a plan backed by the NUS.

Parekh, on behalf of the Union, said that by raising tuition fees, they were forcing students from poorer backgrounds out of a university education. He also stated that the government were merely seeing students as “consumers” who were buying a degree, and undermining the true value of life-long learning.

Jo Johnson, the Universities Minister, stood by the proposals, claiming that “Universities are engines of economic growth and social mobility” and that by creating competition between universities would lead to higher standards of teaching across the board.

George Osborne claimed that fees £3000 a year was too much

This embarrassingly comes just days after a letter written by George Osborne to the Labour government 13 years ago surfaced on Facebook in which he claims that £3,000 a year fees were too high and a “tax on learning”, ironically stating that his government would instead scrap tuition fees altogether. It’s now even more awkward as tuition fees have tripled since then under his government, and they’re currently planning to raise them even higher.

Considering that the UK has the second largest economy in the EU, we still have the highest tuition fees in the industrialised world. It’s also been pointed out that tuition fees cost more to enforce than the government receives back in loan repayments, the average student only paying back around £15,000 of their loans.