UK Postgraduate Recruitment: Seeing the Wood for the Trees

• The pandemic and cost of living crisis have shifted UK domestic PGT towards older audiences and this trend continues in search
• PGR enrolments have been steady, but expanding UKRI funding to international students hasn't had a big impact
• A selection of audiences elsewhere in Africa and Asia were growing alongside India and Nigeria in 2022; East Asian audiences have been the most robust of these in search since

Last month's full HESA student data release means we now know what UK postgraduate recruitment looked like... as of the 2022/23 academic year.

It's easy to chuckle grimly at the delay in this sector insight, especially when we're in such a volatile period for PG recruitment. But it's precisely because of that volatility that the data we have from HESA is so vital, however delayed.

What we have here is a view of how domestic recruitment and enrolment was continuing to evolve post-pandemic and how the impact of the Graduate Route visa was maturing, prior to the cacophony of policy changes that hit international students over the past 18 months.

And we can go one further.

Our Keystone Pulse and Share of Search data can help fill in the intervening period and tell us whether what we saw in 2022 enrolments is still present in 2024 audiences.

I should say at the outset that if you want a full exploration of 2022/23 HESA, including a very good explanation of some of the changes and wrinkles, I defer and refer to the excellent work David Kernohan is doing at Wonkhe.

Here, I'm going to stay in my lane and pick out a few highlights for PG.

PGT

The overall trend at Masters-level should be fairly familiar; or, at least, relatively unsurprising:

Domestic enrolments gradually fall from their height in 2020. We could see this as a regression to the previous trend, but I'm not sure that's the right way to talk about a time series that crosses a global pandemic. In any case, it's the shape of domestic PGT that's interesting – more on that in a moment.

International enrolments finally overtake domestic in 2022. More to say on that in a moment too. And EU enrolments fall a little further following the removal of fee, funding and mobility entitlements.

PG..Er?

Here we have a potential caveat.

After years of not a lot happening, it looks like total domestic and international enrolments finally increase in 2022/23. The problem is that entrants don't. That means HESA finds more people studying a PhD (or similar) at UK universities in 2022, despite less people starting one.

If you were in London with us last week you'll have seen me musing on this to little avail. It can't simply be that people are taking longer to complete a PhD (a reasonable supposition given the pandemic and one we should be thinking about) because those additional students have to come from somewhere (if they were already studying they'd have been in the 2021/22 count). It's either that HESA changes have impacted how some students are being counted, it's something else I'm not seeing or it's just... a bug. Watch this space for an edit when I know more.

Otherwise, not a lot is happening. The big change for PGR in this period was the expansion of UKRI funding to overseas students, which doesn't have a significant impact. Non-EU entrants do grow by c.500 between 2020/21 and 2021/22, but that's actually smaller than the increase in the previous year and, in any case, it drops back by about 100 in 2022/23 (which is one of the reasons the totals above don't make sense).

There clearly is a need to re-think international PGR in the UK and come up with a policy approach that doesn't simply redistribute slices from a small funding pie, particularly given the splash damage from wider perceptions of the UK that we're seeing in our monthly data.

I've written before about the way the pandemic reshaped enrolments from domestic students. It's not simply that more people opted to start a Masters during the pandemic: it's that this effect happened for the first time for older audiences:

Above we see new entrants (so, people starting a Masters-level qualification) plotted by age bracket.

All three lines peak in 2020/21 as the carrots of online learning, furlough and free time meet the sticks of unprecedented professional disruption and career uncertainty. Frankly, the pandemic does more for postgraduate taught study in 2020 than the Masters loan did in 2016.

But look what happens next. The 21-24 'continuer' audience steadily falls back to 2019 levels, dropping by 12% in 2021 and a further 17% in 2022. It's a similar, though less dramatic, trend for 25-29.

But the 30+ group only falls 4% in 2021 and it's effectively flat from there.

To put this another way: 2,625 fewer UK students aged 21-24 started a Masters-level course in 2022 than in 2019. The number of new students aged 30+ increased by 16,480.

What about after 2022?

We don't have HESA data for 2023/24 enrolments yet, but our Pulse data suggests that searching audiences continue to be older:

Here I've plotted the age ranges of searching UK PGT audiences from 2022 to 2023 so far, with a quarterly view to smooth out the visualisation.

You can clearly see how big the 35+ segment is throughout this period. It accounted for 48% of the searching audience in Q3 2022 (when HESA data sees the 30+ group account for 47% of new enrolments) and is at 52% as of Q3 2024.

There are lots of potential reasons for this: the pandemic as a catalyst, raising awareness of flexible study that suits older learners; the drive for working-age professionals to reskill (ahem, AI); the downward pressure on younger graduates faced with the almost impossible economics of postgraduate study.

But it's clear that the audience for your postgraduate Masters programmes continues to be much older and much bigger than the undergraduates you see on campus. The challenge is reaching them.

I don't usually use these posts to 'plug' our products and services, but I will put my credibility on the line and say that our PG study fairs can help here. Part of the value these offer students is the chance to explore the concept of going (back) to university for a Masters/PhD. And we're often the place these returner audiences go to connect and ask questions. Being the university they connect with is obviously valuable, but so is learning from those questions.

If what we see in the rear-view mirror for domestic recruitment in 2022 points to where we are and where we seem to be going then the international equivalent is like being distracted by a gorgeous sunset before driving smack bang into a pothole.

We know the broad strokes. Huge increases in recruitment from India, even faster growth from Nigeria and a bumpy (but still sizeable) cohort for China. And then a year or so of careening policy announcements and enactments.

The oaks of 2022 met the chainsaws of 2023 and 2024 (the details and impact of which we've covered before). But were there any acorns?

The above chart shows the non-EU countries with the biggest % increase in UK postgraduate taught enrolments from 2021/22 to 2022/23.

It includes India and Nigeria, naturally, as both grew substantially from substantial bases (Nigeria, for example, went from 34,355 enrolments to 60,745).

But the chart also includes a range of countries that grew almost as much or, in the case of Sri Lanka and Iran, slightly more. We need to be careful with this kind of analysis as small bases can produce big deltas (I've excluded any country with less than 1,000 2021/22 enrolments, for that reason). Hence the 'acorns' metaphor.

But these were still some pretty promising acorns. Enrolments from Sri Lanka, for example, grew by 3,005 – that's more than the total 2021/22 enrolments from any EU country other than Ireland.

This gives us a view of the growth (and diversification) we might have had.

What about after 2022?

Did the acorns manage to duck the chainsaws? Here's how things look in Share of Search right now:

Here I've taken the same countries (minus Iran due to data quality issues) comparing their change in total enrolments between 2021/22 and 2022/23 to their change in Share of Search between H1 2023 and H2 2024. Against this I've plotted a line with the current total UK Share of Search for each audience. This tells us how interested each is in UK study right now.

Unfortunately (but perhaps unsurprisingly) this shows that all of these previously fast-growing audiences are now falling, but the effect is far from even.

In particular, we can see that Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand look potentially promising. All three grew by around 25% in 2022/23, have dropped by less than 15% this year and remain very likely to search for the UK vs other destinations. They aren't huge audience (around 9,000 enrolments collectively in 22/23) but they aren't tiny either.

And those other acorns? Maybe it's worth keeping some of them in our back pockets. The weather can change, after all . And our data will continue to monitor it.

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