The increasingly inaccurately named HESA Spring 2024 rolls forward with the publication of a large proportion of the remaining 2022-23 Student open data.
Spring officially ends on 12 September this year, when a further eight tables will finally be updated (including the perennially popular non-UK students by country) and an exciting four new tables (covering – I hear – distance learning, placements, sandwich years, and overseas study) will be added.
I’ve written plenty elsewhere about the absolute state of the 2022-23 Student record and the political underpinnings of this slow-motion car crash. The whole mess is now up for an independent review. I’m not intending to go through all that again here, you will be pleased to learn, but you do need to bear in mind (and I will draw attention to egregious issues as we go) that some of this data is not available at the level of quality that we might expect.
How many students, where, and what level?
HESA’s news story leads with the expansion of postgraduate taught provision – there were more than 700,000 taught postgraduate students in the sector in 2022-23, with more than half hailing from outside the UK. In this context, the notable falls in PGT recruitment at stalwart research focused providers like the University of Bath, the University of Glasgow, and Cardiff University, are surprising.
The truism that it is postgraduate taught provision (and, in particular, international postgraduate taught provision) that is keeping large parts of the sector financially viable suggests that the market has become more competitive. You’d think there would be a reputational advantage for Russell Group providers – but, though we see some growth in the places we might expect this is not universal.
Where do they all live?
We’ve not been getting student accommodation by provider for long, but it is my forlorn hope that somebody at the Department for Education (or some other interested department, I’m not fussy) is looking at this map and considering some joined up cross-government planning. If that’s you – hello! – drop me a note.
It’s a perennial issue, familiar to Wonkhe readers. While it may be administratively convenient to treat provider capacity as being elastic in response to market demand, the provision of accommodation is even harder to scale up and scale down – especially where we have to consider multiple large providers in the same local area.
For example, two large providers in Bristol (the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England) have seen a year on year rise in student demand for “other rented accommodation” (your non-purpose built “student house” HMO, if you will). Is the Bristol conurbation able to meet this demand and any future increases? Is there someone sat in Dan Norris’ office thinking about this? I do hope so – because it would be awful if hundreds of students had to miss welcome week because there wasn’t enough accommodation ready in Bristol.
It is worth keeping an eye also on Bath, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle, Swansea, Glasgow… basically anywhere with two large and expanding universities. But don’t forget the smaller places – was there really an extra 1,000 (other rental) student bed spaces created in St Andrews between 2021 and 2022? And what did this mean for the rest of the town?
What are they studying?
With the advent of Skills England, and the accompanying regional and local devolution of skills planning, it is fair to wonder whether the mix of subjects offered by higher education provider will also see scrutiny – what students study also underpins one of the longest lived golf club bar criticisms of the sector (from people who don’t realise just how big a deal internationally the UK fashion and creative media industry is).
Let’s start by looking nationally. The market has decreed that we needed a bunch more undergraduate business courses than we did in 2021-22, whereas engineering and technology were less of a priority.
If we take a look at that in terms of locality, we can see a few holdouts still growing (blue) in a declining engineering market (the remaining orange providers – the size of the dot shows the number of students, the colour the direction of travel from last year).
This final chart helps us see the way in which subject portfolios are changing overtime. For our purposes, Exeter moved into chemical, process, and energy engineering and away from minerals engineering in 2019-20. This decision appears to have bucked the wider trend, and also bolstered recruitment in mechanical engineering. To be clear we are talking about tiny numbers of students by this point, but tiny numbers of students make a big difference in high-cost subjects.
Good sector data is important
If you were planning, in a painful financial environment, which courses you wanted to run (or focus on recruiting to) in 2024-25, and you wanted to make a decision based on the health of the subject locally and nationally – the appearance of this data a few days before the start of September is of no use whatsoever. Likewise, if you were a regulator who had suddenly remembered that they might have responsibilities around the overall health of particular strategically important subjects within the sector (say, some time in early July), the data that would allow you to make these determinations in a transparent way hasn’t really been available.
Because I don’t work in a provider I can sometimes feel like these open tables exist only for the amusement of nerds like me. This is not the case. An important part of the sector’s self knowledge has been missing for most of this calendar year. We probably need to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I will make the point I always make when anyone analyses term time accommodation/postcode data is that there is such a variety of practice as to how providers return this, the HESA guidance has always been quite vague on this, that one needs to be careful with drawing too many conclusions from it.
To take the point about timing there is really no logical reason why a subset of this data should not be ‘live’ i.e. returned each day.