A Chinese student interested in studying here at the University of Sheffield may wonder what sorts of scholarships are available to international students. Despite a time difference of half a day, she can get an answer anytime online, thanks to Ask Sheffield. The Web portal fields some 120,000 questions from students and their families each year.
If that same Chinese student ends up matriculating at Sheffield, chances are that a bright-pink-walled student-services information desk, the physical counterpart to Ask Sheffield, will become a familiar destination.
On a typical day, a steady stream of students passes through, seeking help with financial-aid forms, student-visa applications, and transcripts, as well as physical- and mental-health issues. The office even offers short-term emergency financial assistance, of up to a few hundred dollars, to students whose loans or grants have not yet been processed. Each year the one-stop shop, which serves as the point of entry to the university’s vast student-services department, handles another 120,000 in-person inquiries.
For a few years now, Sheffield has approached student services in terms of the “student journey,” from recruitment to enrollment to career planning to alumni activities, says Andrew West, director of student services. That department, which integrates several previously separate units under a single administrative umbrella, is one of the largest student-services operations in British higher education, employing more than 400 people.
Nearly a quarter of Sheffield’s students are from overseas, and the links forged by the integrated structure help to ensure that internationalization isn’t a priority just at the recruitment stage, but remains central to academic affairs, career services, and other aspects of the student experience, he says.
Mr. West, a 15-year veteran of Sheffield, was until recently also the head of Amosshe, Britain’s national organization for university student-services professionals. Other institutions, he says, might have one-stop shops dedicated to student recruitment, English-language instruction for foreign students, or learning and teaching services—individual components of what is now an integrated unit at Sheffield.
The customer-driven approach, while more common in the United States, is gaining ground in Britain, where increases in tuition and other changes envisioned in a recent government white paper on higher education, billed as an effort to put students at the heart of the system, are set to take effect this year. The notion of what is beginning to be called “student development” is taking hold, Mr. West says. Universities have begun to move away from seeing student services as remedial tools aimed at students’ problems and toward a view of a holistic student experience of both academic and personal development, he says.
As domestic students pay more to attend university, there are widespread expectations that they will become more demanding consumers and that student services will need to adapt rapidly to those new power dynamics. Neither that nor the forthcoming government-led changes, which include requiring universities to be more open about information such as the employability of graduates, will require much upheaval for Sheffield, Mr. West says.
Besides, last year 6,740 of the university’s 25,805 students came from overseas and therefore paid much higher tuition than domestic students do. “It’s not for us unusual to have students on campus who are contributing a great deal of money,” Mr. West says. The consumer-driven approach that the government’s plans promise to put in place throughout higher education, he says, is already a core element of Sheffield’s identity.
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