Iniciativa legislativa y procedimiento legislativo

The majority of students described a sequence of decision-making that followed the selection procedure laid down by UCAS administration of university application. First they selected a pool of possible institutions, and at some point later they narrowed this to two possible choices, one of these being their preferred choice. Financial considerations could, in principle, play a role in either or neither of these stages in the decision-making process. For students in the independent schools the selection of the initial pool was guided by notions of a ‘good university’:

Bodhi: But it is in a general sense seeing what roughly the better uni’s are can help, ‘cos it narrows down the list of what you might want to see or, you know, whose website you might want to look at. And they’ve also got a thing in the back which runs down the Oxford colleges, so you can have a little read of that.

Socially advantaged students in state schools also narrowed down choice to some extent by considering accommodation costs and avoiding obviously more expensive options while retaining options to study in HEIs they regarded as of higher quality. Socially disadvantaged students were much more likely to limit their initial pool by restricting themselves to local options, although this tended not to apply to ‘low income/high grade’ students. Although financial considerations entered into the decision-making at the ‘pool stage’, they did so through students’ existing knowledge of location and the association between location and costs of accommodation. In some instances this was based on students’ belief that their choice of institution was important to their future income and that this must outweigh any variation in immediate financial cost:

Interviewer: So do you feel you’re pretty knowledgeable about the financial support and loans and that kind of thing?

Martin (SD SS, Interview 1): Yeah, I think I am now, ‘cos I’ve researched it all up, but I could have done a better job by researching it before I went to [visit] university? Interviewer: Okay, so you didn’t do that until.

Martin: But I didn’t want to let finances be a factor because in the careers it’s all determined on if you get a degree, what university you go to.

Interviewer: So it was deliberate, then that you didn’t look at financial issues before you chose your university?

Martin: Yeah, it was yeah.

This student suggested that the effects of a degree on his career are ‘all determined’ by the university he attends. A minority of socially disadvantaged students did consider financial issues other than those associated with accommodation costs when choosing their initial pool of institutions. One student had considered finance in her selection of a pool of universities, looking at elite or ‘good’ universities and the additional financial support they would offer. She made a point of asking about finance on open days and also speaking to students about this while she was there.

Sarah (Interview 1): Well, most uni’s on the open days gave us stuff about the cost of living. It’s quite difficult to find the cost of … I mean the information about how much tuition fees are and how much bursaries are, it was quite fine. But to work out like accommodation and other living costs, it’s quite difficult to find out.

Most of the interviewed students had attended at least one university open day, the majority of which incorporated a session on financial support. Students can utilise a range of sources in gathering information to use in making decisions about university entrance. The questionnaire asked students to indicate which out of a list of possible sources of information they had used to gain information about financial support. They were allowed to select any number of items in the list and the results are presented in Table 6.

Table 6 Sources of information used to gain information on financial support

Source

Proportions of students who used the source Higher Education

UCAS Directory / UCAS Big Guide 11%

UCAS Website 23%

University prospectuses 36%

University open days 27%

Formal university visits interviews 11%

University websites 31%

Higher Education fairs/conventions 8% Parents and peers

Parents 17%

Other family members 10%

Friends 15%

Schools, Colleges, Teachers

Personal tutors 10%

Subject teachers 7%

School/college advice and guidance services 13% Other educational agencies

Aimhigher activities 3%

Aimhigher website 4%

External Connexions staff / careers advisors 5%

Visiting speakers 12%

National Media

Search engines (e.g., Google) 12%

Newspapers 8%

In terms of frequency of reference, HE sources predominate. Parents are referred to more frequently than schools, and other external agencies such as Aimhigher programmes are referred to only minimally. These relative priorities were repeated in the interviews. Even by the time of the second research interview very few students had heard of the bursary map website and only a few had viewed the student finance direct website.

Most students referred to a narrow range of sources (Figure 1) with the median number being two. A substantial number did not indicate any source. We investigated whether this was likely to be a non-response to the question. In the same response

table students were also asked to indicate their sources of information about universities and courses in general. Only 4% made no response in this part of the table. We concluded that failing to indicate an information source on financial support was more likely to indicate that no sources had been used, rather than a non-response to the question. This interpretation is consistent with the qualitative data from interviews.

Figure 1. Percentages of students using a given number of information sources on finance

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7+ Number of sources

There are two other significant sources of variation in the information used by students on financial support: the extent to which different types of student make more use of one source of information than another; and the extent to which schools and other educational agencies support students’ decision-making.

3.2.2 What differences are there between students in their approach to