Who cares about the REF?
Thursday May 11th was REF Day, the day on which UK universities found out how their research had been rated by independent assessment panels. It’s a busy time for researchers and communications teams, whatever they may think of the process itself.
The Research Excellence Framework gets a decidedly mixed response from the higher education community, but there’s no denying that a lot of hard work has gone in to the submissions from every university, and it’s worth celebrating those efforts.
The time and energy devoted to compiling REF submissions should be recognised, and part of this recognition means making sure we explain the value of the REF to different audiences – ideally, to ones who actually care about it.
Do students care?
To those in undergrad recruitment wondering how to make use of your institution's REF2021 ranking, stop now. Over the years we’ve done a lot of research with students, and, on the whole, prospective undergraduate students do not care about research outputs.
They just don’t.
If you ask them, they’ll no doubt say that it’s helpful to know that their chosen university carries out good research – but ask them to say how important that research is compared to, say, cost of living or student experience… it shoots way down the list. It’s only ever a supporting factor, something that’s nice to have, rather than an essential part of the decision-making process.
I’ll admit that there will be some students for whom research excellence is important – those who are considering further study after their undergraduate degree, for example, or those with a very specialist subject in mind – but as a general rule? It’s just not a consideration. You want to spend time and effort communicating REF information to those for whom it is a factor.
Some students do care
So which students might care about REF?
Simply put, it’s postgraduate students. And not even all of them. Taught postgraduate students will care a little – they want to know they’re learning from an institution with a good track record. But the ones who really care are research students – those doing an MRes, a PhD, a Masters by Research… whatever form that research takes, they’re the students who’ll have an interest in the work that has led to your REF results.
Unfortunately, what I’ve found is that universities tend to assume these students know what it all means. They assume that the students know the intricacies of UK research funding, or of the different classifications and categories of subjects, or how to make sense of the different percentages that get used in REF press releases. But trust me – they don’t.
If you want these students to see how great your research is, you'll need to make it clear to them.
Explain
I tried to find a decent page on a university website that explained what REF2021 meant for those unfamiliar with it. I looked at REF information provided by around 20 university websites, from different types of institution, and I found:
a lot of assumptions about what the read already knew
a lot of undefined initialisms and acronyms
a lot of academic jargon and higher education-related terms
walls of text
in one case, the explainer was published as a plain-text PDF
Yes, it’s reasonable to assume a certain level of knowledge among people looking at this kind of content – especially those applying to postgraduate positions. But the REF is a pretty complex beast, and explaining what it means is going to open up the importance of that research to a lot more people.
Give examples
As well as falling short in explaining what the REF actually is, universities are also falling into the trap of all following the same pattern when announcing their REF results. Almost every university does the same thing, uses the same stats, and uses the same line about being "world-beating". This is not going to make decisions any easier for students...
The pedants among you will have noticed that in an earlier paragraph I actually said that students will be interested in what led to your REF results. And this is probably the most important thing to remember here – usually, what students want to know about is the research stories, the actual work that’s been done.
They’re highly unlikely to be comparing universities to each other to see who’s got the highest percentage of 4-star graded research outputs – that’s not how they make a decision. So the "world-beating" line, the percentages... even if you’ve got a great explainer for them, you’ll also want to be showcasing the work itself.
That’s what will really make a difference.
If you want to talk to us about what will work for undergraduate students, or about how you can make better use of those research stories you've been compiling, then get in touch.
