European higher education systems have evolved from ‘elite’ to ‘mass’ systems, where increasing proportions of school leavers and mature students attend higher education. In some countries this has produced fears about the decline of higher education quality, due to declines in per-student government spending (OECD 1998, 2009, Barr 2004). Countries all over Europe have sought innovative solutions to compensate for shortfalls in public funding of higher education. Among these solutions, there has been a gradual move towards introducing or increasing tuition fees in several European countries, Such as the Netherlands, some German states, and the UK.

Most policy debates on tuition fee rises address their effects on participation in higher education, especially amongst socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Research on this topic usually finds that higher tuition fees deter students from attending higher education (e.g. Dearden et al. 2011, Hemelt and Marcotte 2008). However few studies address the experiences and satisfaction of students in higher education. Those studies that do address this question in Europe have been qualitative (e.g. Crozier et al. 2008), and do not address tuition fee rises. Thus there is not only a lack of studies on the effects of tuition fees on student satisfaction, but also a lack of quantitative studies testing the relevance of sociological theories (based namely on ‘habitus’ and cultural capital, Bourdieu 1977) with regards to students’ experiences.

This study fills this knowledge gap by quantitatively examining the effects of the UK 2004 Higher Education Act (HEA), on student satisfaction, and particularly on the satisfaction of working-class students. The UK 2004 HEA reforms rose tuition fees from £1,000 to £3,000 in England but not in Scotland, where English students continued paying approximately £1,000. Thus the reforms represent a unique natural experiment to test the following hypotheses:

A. Paying more tuition fees may make students increasingly view themselves as customers (Eagle & Brennan 2007), and perceive less ‘value for money’ in their education (Gaffney-Rhys & Jones 2008), leading to increased dissatisfaction.

B. Working-class students may be more dissatisfied by the tuition fee increase than middle-class students due to perceptions of ‘value for money’.This may be due to working-class students being more likely to experience difficulties in adapting to university, or having less accurate expectations regarding higher education, due to their working class ‘habitus’ (or dispositions) and tendency to lack cultural capital (Reay et al. 2010). Similarly, prospective working-class students tend to be more debt-averse and deterred by the costs of higher education (Callender & Johnson 2005). This increased dissatisfaction may not be felt in more prestigious universities (see C).

C. More prestigious universities, because of their stronger pedagogic framing, sense of identity and boundaries with the outside world, may be more likely to guide working-class students in gaining the cultural capital necessary to adapt effectively to higher education (Crozier & Reay 2011). Alternatively, since working-class students tend to have less accurate expectations of higher education, their satisfaction may be more affected by institutional prestige and perceived quality.

Barr, N., (2004). “Higher Education Funding”, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 20 (2), pp. 264-283. Bourdieu, P., (1977). “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction”, in J. Karabel, A .H. Halsey, (eds.), Power and Ideology in Education, Oxford University Press: Oxford. Callender, C., Jackson, J., (2005). “Does the fear of debt deter students from higher education?”, Journal of Social Policy, 34 (4), pp.509-540. Crozier, G., Reay, D., (2011). “Capital accumulation: working-class students learning how to learn in HE”, Teaching in Higher Education, 16 (2), pp.145-55. Crozier, G., Reay, D., Clayton, J., Colliander, L., Grinstead, J., (2008). “Different strokes for different folks: diverse students in diverse institutions – experiences of higher education” Research Papers in Education, 23 (2), pp.167-77. Dearden, L., Fitzsimons, E., Wyness, G., (2011). “The impact of tuition fees and support on university participation in the UK” IFS Working Paper W11/17, Institute for Fiscal Studies. Eagle, L., Brennan, R., (2007) “Are students customers ? TQM and marketing perspectives”, Quality Assurance in Education, 15 (1), pp.44-60. Gaffney-Rhys, R., Jones, J., (2008). “Reflections on the UK National Student Survey: a business and management case study”, Newport CELT Journal, 1, pp.3-14. Harrison, N., (2011). “Have the changes introduced by the 2004 Higher Education Act made higher education admission in England wider and fairer?”, Journal of Education Policy, 26 (3), pp.449-468. Hemelt, S., Marcotte, D., (2008). “Rising Tuition and Enrollment in Public Higher Education”, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Discussion Paper 3827. OECD (1998). Education at a Glance, 1998. Paris, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD (2008). Education at a Glance, 2008. Paris, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Reay, D., Crozier, G., Clayton, J., (2010). “‘Fitting in’ or ‘standing out’: working‐class students in UK higher education”, British Educational Research Journal, 36 (1), pp.107-24