Comparing university tuition fees with PBRF performance

Data

The data used in this analysis comes from two sources. The quality of research is measured by the average quality score by subject area and university from the 2003 PBRF Quality Evaluation⁶ and tuition fees data for 2003 is sourced from the Single Data Return (SDR). The average quality score is a weighted measure of the quality of research produced by staff at participating TEOs. Each staff member was allocated a quality score from 0 to 10, with 10 representing the highest level of peer-assessed quality.

In total, there are 41 subject areas where information is available on university performance. However, not all universities are represented in all subject panels, due to the nature of specialisation at each institution. Also, where there is only one provider in a subject area (such as Veterinary science and Dentistry) this subject is omitted from the analysis.

In total, there were 223 pairs of observations available for this analysis.