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[nomad soul]

Getting what you pay for: how quality compares with price for masters courses
By Melanie Butler, EL Gazette | December 2015
Source: http://www.elgazette.com/

In order to assess value for money, you measure quality against cost. Measuring the cost of a masters degree is straightforward; you just look at the fees, although it can take you a while to find them on a university website. In fact, it took our researcher three working days – and some phone calls to university departments – to establish the costs.

Assessing quality is more complex. What makes a good masters? Good teaching? Good teaching practice? One measure, appropriate only at postgraduate level, is whether the lecturers on the course are research active and how important their research is. It is important to point out here that the research quality of a department is of most importance to masters students who are primarily concerned with improving their knowledge base for which they need to understand the research. For those, and there are many of them, who are more concerned with improving their teaching skills, a course taught by research-active lecturers may be less relevant than having a good complement of teacher trainers on the staff and teaching practice on the course.

For those turning to a masters degree to improve their knowledge base the extent and quality of research in a given university department is not actually very difficult to establish. Every four years British universities undergo the Research Excellence Framework, the Ref, a process whereby they submit examples of research for evaluation to a government body which awards points out of four – the Grade Point Average (GPA) – with two being the benchmark for international quality research. The process is expensive, time-consuming and not without contention, but it does produce a clear quality benchmark in a given subject area.

Fortunately for us the Times Higher Education takes the raw data produced by the Ref teams and ranks the universities according to each subject area under which it submitted. Unfortunately for us, masters related to English language teaching are submitted to the Ref under more than one subject area. In fact, they are submitted under three: education, English language and linguistics. This makes comparisons somewhat harder to do: is it harder to get a good Ref score in linguistics than, say, education?

A further complication is that not all staff submit research; it is perfectly possible for a university department to achieve a high score without submitting any research at all from the team running the masters degree in Applied Linguistics or English Language Teaching. To obviate that problem, the Gazette team checked the number of submissions made by members of the teams of those degrees. When faced by papers submitted by applied linguists or language specialists which did not seem to us to be relevant to the masters concerned (the use of metaphor in Welsh language fairy tales, for example), we did not include those results.

This was not enough to satisfy everything. The Language Centres at Queen Mary’s, University of London, for example, felt that their high score belonged to the linguistics department which had received the top score in that field in the entire Ref. We had originally included it because we were looking at the research levels of the lecturers on specific courses, not on departments. Enough staff teaching on the language centre masters had submitted linguistics research for us to include the course. Following objections from the language centre, however, we reluctantly removed Queen Mary’s from our graphs despite the fact that they ranked top in linguistics and second for ELT-related masters overall.

Unsurprisingly, the Russell Group, the UK universities which specialise in research, did well in the rankings – research universities tend to have a larger number of research-active staff. This can actually be a disadvantage at undergraduate level, and possibly even for those masters students wanting a practical teaching-focused course with plenty of hands-on practice – just because you are great at research may not mean you are great at teaching. For postgraduates wanting a solid grounding in theory, however, these are the universities to look for.

A large number of the newer universities score between two and three – reaching international level in terms of research, according to the Ref, if not yet quite world class. Two, Westminster and Bedfordshire, did make it into the top half of the table. The Welsh also do well, with Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor all scoring comfortably above three while costing below the average on fees.

For when it comes to value of money it is the cost of the course, as well as the ranking of the course, that influences the final outcome. And, as we shall see in this feature, the comparative cost of the course depends, at least in part, whether you are an international student or a citizen of the European Union.

Unis and masters courses checked by the Gazette for Ref submission:

KEY: Education - Linguistics - English language

Aberdeen (MSc TESOL) - Anglia Ruskin (MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL) - Aston (MA TESOL) - Bangor (MA Linguistics) - Bedfordshire (MA Applied Linguistics-TEFL) - Birkbeck (MA TESOL) - Birmingham (MA TEFL; MA TESOL; MA Applied Linguistics) - Bristol (MSc TESOL) - Cambridge (MPhil Theoretical and Applied Linguistics; MPhil Education – Research in Second Language Acquisition) - Cardiff (MA Applied Linguistics) - Central Lancashire (MA TESOL with Applied Linguistics)

Edinburgh (MA TESOL; MSc Applied Linguistics) - Essex (MA TEFL/TESOL) - Exeter (MEd TESOL; MPhil TESOL) - Glasgow (MSc TESOL; MEd TESOL) - Goldsmiths (MA Multilingualism, Linguistics and Education) - Institute of Education (MA TESOL) - King’s College London (MA TESOL; MA Applied Linguistics & ELT)

Lancaster (MA TESOL) - Leeds (MA TESOL; MA teaching English for Academic Purposes; MA TESOL and ICT; MA TESOL for Young Learners; MA TESOL Studies; MA TESOL Teacher Education; MEd TESOL; MA Linguistics and English Language Teaching) - Leicester (MA TESOL; MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL) - Liverpool (MA TESOL)

Manchester (MA TESOL) - Newcastle (MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL) - Nottingham (MA TESOL) - Oxford (MSc Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition) - Oxford Brookes (MA Education TESOL) - Queen’s University Belfast (MA TESOL) - Reading (MA English Language Teaching; MA Applied Linguistics; MRes Applied Linguistics) - Roehampton (MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL)

Southampton (MA Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching; MA English Language Teaching; MA ELT/TESOL Studies) - Salford (MA TESOL and Applied Linguistics) - Sheffield (MA Applied Linguistics with TESOL) - Stirling (MA TESOL) - Sussex (MA ELT) - Swansea (MA TEFL) - Ulster (MA TESOL) - Westminster (MA TESOL) - Warwick (MA English Language Teaching) - York (MA TESOL; MA Teaching English to Young Learners)

(End of article)

Edited by NS to add color coding

[currentaffairs]

Can you post the link to the article itself? Where is the table? Good site and article. Cheers!

[nomad soul]

Update: I color coded each degree program to match the table in the digital article.

[D. Amokachi]

Interesting read thanks. I'm going to need to update my qualifications in a couple of years and there's a hell of a lot to wade through what with the DELTA and all different kinds of masters.

[adventious]

It's not only useful, it's lit up like the holiday season!

[currentaffairs]

Lancaster is actually in the Linguistics pile.. I didn't look at any of the other ones as it is my old university.