We’ve been running our Postgraduate Pulse tracker for almost two years now and the thousands of monthly responses we’ve had have built up a unique longitudinal picture of the prospective Masters and PhD audience during a hugely important time for postgraduate study.
Most of the time that data tells us things we broadly expect to see – such as the cyclical shift from autumn to spring start dates or the (welcome) drop in Covid concern amongst prospective student audiences.
Sometimes it tells us things that surprise us or make us think, such as the persistent interest in online study for older UK students or the fact that people will travel much further to attend a PhD open day than they will for a Masters.
Either way, it’s my job to ensure the insights we extract from that data and the stories we tell with it are as accurate and useful as possible.
Which is why, in this case, I need to highlight something in our autumn data.
... but domestic PG confidence was increasing until recently.
From July to August we saw a sharp increase in the proportion of people feeling positive about UK Masters and PhD study. This seemed difficult to square with the current economic circumstances, especially as we’d seen confidence drop during the UK cost of living crisis.
Well, it turns out that a minor change in our survey methodology may have unwittingly ‘inflated’ these results by introducing a bias towards more positive answers. I’ve explained this below as a (hopefully) useful lesson for anyone designing their own surveys.
This temporary error means that the ‘jump’ in domestic confidence from July to August is inflated.
However, this doesn’t change the upward trend we’d seen during August, September and October: the UK domestic audience was getting more confidence about postgraduate study in the autumn, even if they were never as confident as the inflated data suggested.
This means that my previous discussion and conclusions regarding the impact of the cost of living crisis on PG study are still broadly relevant (I’ve made updates to caveat some conclusions, where necessary).