'Survey of higher education students' attitudes to debt' - Suppressed or not?

Lots of coverage of 'the study Universities UK Tried To Suppress' in the press. And it ties in with graduate employment, so here we go.

The research, is called "Survey of higher education students' attitudes to debt and term-time working and their impact on attainment".

It was conducted by a very good research team, with an established track record in the field, including Claire Callendar of South Bank University and Brenda Little of CHERI at the Open University, looked at student attitudes to debt and got some good soundbites from the usual NUS and government suspects. But what does it really say?

The study was based on 1,500 questionnaire returns from a postal survey of final year UK domiciled finalists from seven universities, that was sent out in March-April 2002.

The majority of students 'took a pragmatic attitude to debt', but it particularly worried certain groups who are already under-represented at universities, and who are also more likely to work in term-time; older students, those from lower social classes and single parents.

68% worked during their final two years, and the main reasons were to 'pay for things they needed to survive' and because students' families were unable to help financially - again, older students and those from lower social classes were most likely to cite these reasons. Work experience was a reason for less than half of those working ('a distraction from study' was also mentioned!)

Whilst the authors state that the study cannot definitively say that working during term time directly results in poor academic performance, more than half of students who did work stated that they felt that they produced poorer quality assignments, and more than 80% said that they spent less time on independent study and reading. Students were more likely to say that their academic work suffered the more hours that they worked. And the study did find that, other known factors taken into account, students who worked got lower marks. To quote:

"For a student working 16 hours a week, the odds of getting a good degree (i.e. 2(i) and above) to not getting a good degree are about 60% of the odds for a similar non-working student"

Their conclusion is that term-time working can be a factor to explain why some students who work do worse than those who don't (rather than it just being a social product of the people who are doing the work, for example, and not the work directly).

There is not yet a great body of work on student attitudes to debt, and the effect it does have. It is taken as an article of faith by some that it does deter entry and cause problems, whilst others argue that it's an important rite of passage for the move into employment and helps students get skills they need whilst also earning money. But only a few studies exist and those are largely under old financial systems.

This kind of work reinforces some older studies that suggest that term-time working does result in reduced performance, and it is easy to make the link that lots of work leads to less study time and tired students which leads to poor results. The difficulty is that this conclusion is also a bit of cognitive bias and isn't yet completely supported by the data - and that's where we have to be very careful. What we need is more, good research that can settle the question.

In the meantime, here's the study.