UK postgraduates ‘miss community feeling’ after overseas growth

Many domestic students have been left feeling that they are not part of a postgraduate community on campus in the wake of rapid expansion of UK master’s courses driven by overseas recruitment, despite record levels of overall satisfaction, according to a survey.

In Advance HE’s annual Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, the average score given by domestic students to “community” measures – whether they felt part of a postgraduate community, felt a sense of belonging, and had sufficient opportunities to mix with other master’s students – was only 52 per cent. In contrast, international students gave an average response of 75 per cent.

Across all 98,311 respondents, a sense of community was rated as the lowest-scoring element of the postgraduate experience, with an overall positive score of 68 per cent, 10 points lower than the next lowest area, organisation.

Taught postgraduate programmes have reported rapid increases in international recruitment in recent years, with recruitment of non-European Union international students rising by 169 per cent between 2018-19 and 2022-23, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. This year was the first when the number of non-EU international students was higher than the number of UK students enrolling on to postgraduate courses. 

One respondent told the survey that their course was “more and more being tailored to the international student”. “On numerous occasions I heard the words, ‘This won’t apply to you’, over and over. It’s disheartening and it’s left me with a major feeling of not feeling part of any sort of ‘community’ which is something I value greatly,” they said.

“I had expectations of interacting with other [postgraduate] students as part of the course,” said another. “However, due to large cohort sizes and the majority of teaching being delivered online, this was not feasible.”

Overall satisfaction levels are at their highest level in more than a decade, according to this year’s survey, with 84 per cent of respondents saying that they were satisfied with the quality of their course. However, the variation in responses by domicile that was most stark on the community scores continued into the headline data, with 87 per cent of international students reporting satisfaction, compared with 80 per cent of home learners, mirroring the findings of last year’s survey.

Satisfaction among students from China, India and Nigeria – key student markets which have experienced rapid growth in recent years – was even higher. Ninety per cent of Nigerian students said they were satisfied.

Significantly, overall satisfaction gaps were widest on some of the courses that have grown most rapidly on the back of international enrolments in recent years. On computing courses, only 73 per cent of domestic students reported being satisfied with their course, compared with 85 per cent of international students, while the gap stretched to 9 percentage points on business and management courses, and 8 percentage points in engineering.

However, UK universities have reported significant drops in overseas recruitment for taught postgraduate courses this year, following the introduction of a ban on recruits bringing family members with them.

Shona Quinn, a research and insights executive at Advance HE and the author of the survey report, said that while further research would be needed in order to draw firm conclusions, it was clear that there were “markedly different levels of satisfaction” between domestic and international students.

“International students, particularly those who have just moved to the UK for study, may be more likely to seek out opportunities to engage with other students compared to home students, who are less likely to have moved to a new location to undertake their studies,” she said. “International students may also be benefiting from the range of cultural societies available at many higher education institutions.”

Ms Quinn noted that students who felt a sense of connection to a community may experience a range of knock-on benefits on their well-being and chances of future success.

Only one topic offered a significant exception to this picture. African students reported higher satisfaction than home students across all questions except for when they were asked whether they felt assessment arrangements and marking had been fair. While 77 per cent of domestic students reported satisfaction with this, the score for African students was 74 per cent – a finding that the report notes is all the more striking since African students’ overall satisfaction scores were 10 percentage points higher.

Ethnic minority domestic students also reported being less satisfied with the fairness of assessment arrangements and marking than their white classmates.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com