Are we on top of how big postgraduate taught is getting?

There was an explosion of taught postgraduate enrolment last year, continuing an upward trend visible since the mid 2010s.

There’s all kinds of reasons why this may have happened – people reconsidered careers and aspirations during lockdown, people invest in training and personal development during an economic downturn, and people have been able to access postgraduate taught course loans (which in England offer up to around £11,000 a year that can be spent on fees or maintenance) since 2017.

For providers, PGT is a valuable and growing source of revenue – in an environment where home undergraduate fees are capped (and falling in real terms) and the competition for international students has become more intense the increased demand from home students has been very welcome.

Providers

This first interactive lets you see these patterns by provider. The main graph gives you the numerical growth (or shrinkage) in PGT numbers by providers between 2014-15 and 2020-21 (use the filters at the top to see first year – showing new enrollment – or all years and mode of study), and when you mouse over a dot you see each year broken down by domicile and mode.

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What’s immediately apparent is that the growth has nothing to do with the patterns of prestige we are used to applying to undergraduate recruitment. All kinds of providers have been ramping up PGT recruitment, and there’s nothing that really connects the handful of providers experiencing a decline either.

However, the split between home students and international students varies widely. Here we do see that it is in the main Russell Group and Russell Group adjacent providers that are ramping up the international PGT market, whereas others are focused on the home market.

Subjects

Adding a subject lens – alas, only the most recent two years of data are available here – offers us a deeper insight into what is going on.

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There’s been a huge growth, even over a year, of PGT provision in business subjects – and the majority of this is in full-time provision. If you were wondering about the MBA boom (and there is a boom, though we don’t know anything about modes of study here), this doesn’t all look like the traditional pattern of established managers (or management role candidates) studying part-time.

You can also see evidence of professions where continued professional development – often in the form of a postgraduate qualification – is expected. Law, nursing, medicine, engineering, social work, education, and allied healthcare (some of which shows up in social sciences) make up a substantial proportion of PGT activity.

Money

PGT fees are set by providers and vary wildly – there’s not even a single list (that I know of) of fees across the sector so we’re very much in the “what the market will bear” territory. International postgraduate students are substantially higher than those charged to home students (and are more likely to be full time), but there is an income boost to providers whatever the direction of expansion

Here’s the income related to PGT provision at every provider that returns data to HESA. In most (but not all) places you can see a steady growth in income over the past few years.

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