Closed courses and new programmes

The recent publication of the new Discover Uni data (the once-and-future Unistats of lore) gives us the opportunity to take a very deep dive into subject portfolio review.

As bizarre as it may seem, Discover Uni represents the only publically available complete list of undergraduate courses on offer at UK universities. You might think that the UCAS website counts, but it is not, strictly speaking, “publically available” in the sense of being able to download it and use it to analyse anything. Each national regulator has an eye over the size and shape of the sector, but only at a very broad subject level.

There is, of course, no publicly available list of postgraduate courses at all – something which probably needs to be rectified at some point.

As of the coming 2025 application cycle there are 31,265 course choices an eager applicant could make – this sounds impressive, but the 2024 cycle boasted 33,243. In 2025 some 3,311 of these are business studies courses, down from 3,516 last year. By volume, social science courses are the largest group – 4,041 this cycle, 4,535 last time round.

What’s a course? Well, I can only direct you to Andy Youell. For these purposes, a course is simply something that an applicant can apply to that has a qualification aim (a Bachelor of Arts, a Foundation Degree, a Higher Technical Qualification, or anything else – there’s about 150 possibilities). And I would add – a course is a thing attached to a unique combination of published provider identifier (UKPRN), unistats course code (provider allocated) and mode of study.

Do those numbers seem high? I would agree: some providers appear to have opted to change their course codes for the new year. I’ve identified:

• The University of Bristol
• The University of West London
• Kingston University
• The University of Northampton
• Heriot-Watt University
• Wrexham University

As being affected by this, among larger providers (there are some smaller ones too). I could go either way on Liverpool Hope University – though my gut instinct is that this is a rationalisation of joint routes. In these cases, and probably a few others, we are seeing process artefacts rather than process changes so we should really see these numbers as indicative (and, again, wonder why there isn’t a single canonical public list of courses).

UK higher education exists within a notably vague definition of a course. As one example, the many joint qualification routes can be shown in any number of ways – and attached to any number of subject areas (another source of vagary Wonkhe has covered before). Any number of courses can be made up of a pool of modules – these are sometimes shown as one course with many optional pathways, and sometimes shown as several courses.

That said, we can put numbers on the kind of churn in courses the sector experiences year on year. There were 6,301 courses on offer in the 2024 cycle that are now no longer on offer – while the 2025 cycle has brought 4,323 new courses.

I’ve put together a dashboard of all the new courses – you can search by subject area. Each blob represents a single course, and the blobs are grouped by provider and mission group (the latter being also shown by colour).

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Just under 14 per cent of these new courses are in business studies, just under 13 per cent are in design and the creative arts. In terms of the type of setting these courses are available in we find 21 per cent of all new courses are available from University Alliance providers.

As new courses arrive, old ones depart. Sometimes old ones just depart – some 25 per cent of courses on offer from the Cathedrals Group last cycle are no longer available. There’s no noticeable subject trend – no sense of a movement away from an area of provision that isn’t explained by the overall size of a subject area.

I have also put together a dashboard of departing courses, that works in the same way as the dashboard above.

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Even more than for new courses, many of the departing courses relate to additional study options being lost. Perhaps a course is no longer available part time, or (as is government policy) no longer includes a foundation year. Perhaps placement years or study abroad are no longer supported. You may not personally see these as courses, but they do represent a narrowing of choice within the undergraduate marketplace.

As the overall numbers suggest, there has been a trend for rationalisation in recent years. Smaller and less popular courses are often seen as unviable – something that is increasingly being extended to whole subject areas.

If you want an eye across courses at your provider here is a dashboard of available courses for the 2025 cycle (showing new courses in green).

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And here is a visualisation of courses available in the 2024 cycle (showing courses that are not currently available in red)

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Again, the vagaries of course coding changes and the deletion of supplementary options like years abroad, placements, or foundation years are going to have an impact (it’s actually clearer to see this at institutional level). In some cases this approach of comparing codes across iterations of Discover Uni is clearly not viable. Which is a shame as this is the only mechanism we have – and by “we” I am including regulators and the government – to identify changes in our national portfolio of undergraduate courses, to account for shifts in availability of shortage subjects (at national, regional, and local levels), or to have any chance of planning or investing in courses to address key skills needs.

We are able to offer course lists to applicants (within given parameters) – the data is collected, but is just not made available in a useable format for analysis. This probably needs to change.