Postgraduate taught is getting massive, and not where you might think

International recruitment is a popular source of revenue because fees are unregulated – you can charge as much as the market will stand, which must be why our government feels able to take an extra six per cent of it.

But international undergraduate fees are not the only unregulated fees. There is also no cap on the fees charged to postgraduate students, either from overseas or from the UK.

With this in mind I have been wondering whether there is any evidence that some universities are choosing to up their postgraduate intake as a means to drive expansion. There are many good reasons to do so – demand appears to be rising, both in terms of a demand for specific higher level professional skills, and in terms of the popularity of the Masters in Business Administration.

And there are some universities that have grown their postgraduate numbers substantially.

For a start, the University of Hertfordshire now has more taught postgraduates than undergraduates. So has the University of Teesside. Both BPP University and the University of Law have substantially grown their postgraduate offer since gaining postgraduate degree awarding powers.

At Hertfordshire the expansion has been comparatively recent, and largely focused in business studies. Teesside’s expansion is also recent but has been more evenly split between business, computing, and subjects allied to medicine.

I’ve put together these plots to help illustrate what seems to be going on. The vertical axis shows the difference in the postgraduate population between the most recent available academic year of data (2023-24) and a selectable comparator (you can select 2014-15 or 2019-20). The horizontal axis shows the same change but with respect to undergraduates. There’s also a filter allowing you to filter by mode of study (full time, part time or all).

The first chart is helpful for thinking about changes across the sector overall – you can choose to see an overall total, a CAH level 1 subject area, or a CAH level 3 subject area (allowing you to drill right into academic specialisms). Each mark is one higher education provider – the size of the mark is the overall student population in 2023-24.

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I’ve also put something together to help you see changes within a single provider. Here, you can choose a provider of interest – with each mark showing the change in top level CAH student numbers within that provider.

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Although the Office for Students has oversight across all taught courses, it is fair to say that the majority of regulatory interest has been in undergraduate study. Most of the teaching quality regulatory apparatus (NSS, OfS investigations, TEF) is aimed squarely at undergraduate teaching and undergraduate outcomes.

But the sector now annually awards more postgraduate qualifications than undergraduate, and clearly many providers are focusing more and more on postgraduate provision. It feels like time someone started to take an interest.