They’re just not that interested in the subject

And only a third said that the cost of living had not affected their decision of where to apply – 26 per cent said they would make a choice based around timetable flexibility, and 16 per cent said financial concerns had made them more geographically restricted.

The top impact, however, was choosing cheaper student accommodation.

The headline attached to this year’s Unite Students Applicant Index is that incoming student wellbeing has surpassed pre-pandemic levels for the first time.

But you only have to get to the bullets below to find that it’s international students driving the change.

International applicants feel happier, more satisfied, and that their life is more worthwhile than their peers in 2019, but UK applicants’ outlook has remained broadly flat in recent years.

It reminds me of the persistent problem with National Student Survey (NSS) results, which also consistently show international students as more satisfied.

For home domiciled applicants to make any sense of the figures, they’d need to know how many international students were distorting the figures in their subject, and vice versa.

So while the Press Release has a quote from HEPI director Nick Hillman saying:

….there are some“real grounds for hope…after many years when the obstacles to learning seemed to be growing

… it’s worth digging into the data tables to determine whether that hope is exclusively attached to how well you do at attracting international students – and whether any factors are actually getting worse.

If we compare to 2022, for example, home domiciled confidence over having enough money to cover costs has fallen from 46 per cent to 38 per cent.

Anxiety about fitting in has got no better, confidence about budgeting hasn’t improved, and looking forward to meeting people from different backgrounds has actually fallen by 7pp to 75 per cent amongst home students.

There’s some strangely worded questions in the survey – who knows what students are thinking about when they are invited to share their level of interest in “the social side” of university (isn’t all learning social learning these days) but it’s notable that agreement with having little interest in it has climbed from 25 to 32 per cent (home domiciled).

They certainly seem more driven – some 73 per cent of home domiciled students have a clear idea of their goals (up from 66 per cent in 2022), although they’re less likely to be confident about hitting deadlines – 62 per cent down from 73 per cent 3 years ago.

82 per cent of home students think that their chosen course is a good fit for them – consistently high regret scores in the HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey suggest many of them will work out they’re wrong, if nothing else underlining the need for active and enthusiastic compliance with OfS Condition F2.

Questions on whether students expected to work alongside study (and how many hours) weren’t in previous iterations – but this year a whopping 82 per cent of home students and 94 per cent of international students expect to work.

It very much is starting to look like there won’t be enough work to go around – especially given over a third of home students will be looking for more than 24 hours a week. And someone probably needs warn the 38 per cent of international students saying that about the 20 hours a week limit on their visa.