New rules of engagement

The financial constraints on universities are increasingly well-publicised, as more and more restructure their staffing and reshape business plans in response to severe economic challenges. Last year, Chris Husbands’ HEPI pamphlet Four Futures diagnosed the causes of the current crisis as the long-term erosion of the undergraduate fee, the structural underfunding of research and unpredictable volatility in international student recruitment. The resulting financial problems are real, persistent and enormously demanding of senior leadership attention, but they are accompanied by another challenge for institutions: the composition and expectations of student cohorts has changed rapidly and in often unpredicted ways. It’s not change which is the challenge – universities are constantly navigating changes in student recruitment, behaviours and expectations – but the speed with which the shape of institutions has changed.

Universities have seen extensive changes in the make-up of their student cohort and its expectations in the last half-decade. Many have grown international post-graduate recruitment rapidly, at least in part to mitigate some of the challenges on domestic student funding. Applications for masters’ degree visas tripled from 100,000 in 2019 to over 300,000 in 2023 before falling back sharply. Even those who have not grown numbers rapidly have seen shifts in the geography of student domiciles. There was a widely predicted post-Brexit collapse in EU student recruitment. The number of students from the EU enrolling for a postgraduate course fell from 29330 in 2020, to 17845 in 2021. Other changes were less anticipated. There was a remarkable upswing in applications from West Africa following the restoration of the post-study work visa in 2019, but then between 2023 Q1/Q2 and 2024 Q1/Q2, there was a 70% fall in masters’ degree visa applications from Nigeria. Chinese applications appear to be in long-term decline, and this accelerated to a 20% fall in applications from China between 2023 and 2024. Against these trends, south Asian recruitment increased rapidly with, for example, a 35% increase in applications from Pakistan. The rapid growth and equally rapid fall in PGT populations has posed management challenges for the sector, and, obviously, different international student populations bring different experiences, expectations and needs.

The make-up of domestic student populations has also changed. As competition has intensified, many institutions have seen the intake tariff profile of their students change. One consequence of the cost-of-living crisis has been a tendency for students either to study closer to home, or to live at home to save money. According to the 2024 Student Money and Wellbeing Report, nearly half of UK students now classify themselves as commuter students. And this change has happened quickly: the 2018/19 data suggests that about 25% of UK undergraduates lived at home while studying. At the same time, the subject shape of universities has changed remarkably quickly. There seems to be a ‘swing to Science’, with engineering applications outstripping the supply of expensive-to-deliver places. A handful of subjects including Law, Psychology and Computing have grown very rapidly – exponentially for some institutions, whilst long-term declines in languages and the humanities have put the viability of these subjects in doubt in many universities. 

Layered on top of these changes is a cultural shift in student expectations. There is a complex interaction between the legacy of the pandemic, in which students were required, by and large, to study remotely, the impact of the cost-of-living crisis triggered by rapid inflation in 2022 and 2023, student mental health, and the long-term, if accelerating, impact of technology on students’ preferred mode of engagement. But interact they certainly do: a desire to be able to study flexibly and remotely, a desire to reduce travel costs and to attend campus only when there is sufficient academic activity to make a trip to campus worthwhile, a continuing demand for enhanced attention to study-support and well-being. 

All this makes shaping an inclusive institution more difficult. The academic and non-academic needs of a rapidly growing international post-graduate population are not those of an undergraduate population, and in each case the diversity of needs within a group is enormous. The changing disposition of different students to become course representatives or to vote in student union elections has put pressure on conventional engagement arrangements. It is more difficult to sustain a sense of community given the combination of post-pandemic approaches to hybrid learning and the cost-of-living crisis, which makes it very expensive for commuter students to attend campus – especially when attendance might be for a single lecture in the middle of the day. And the speed of change – these things have happened in less than a decade – has put enormous pressure on institutional systems and processes at a time when many universities are cutting costs and services.. Getting it wrong is expensive in terms of long-term sustainability. But it’s also expensive in the shorter term: the 2% increase in non-continuation rates reported by OfS impacts directly on university budgets, irrespective of the impacts on the life chances and self-esteem of those who drop out.

Universities have begun to respond to the challenges. There is an accelerated shift towards the professionalisation of student support and away from the more traditional ‘academic tutor’ role. Assessment reform is widespread, designed to make degree outcomes more dependent on authentic or ‘real world’ assessment. Some universities have moved to block timetabling arrangements which compress students’ academic programmes into a few days a week, easing travel difficulties and making it easier for students to work alongside study – although timetabling is always a huge challenge in higher education. Other universities are revamping their arrangements for engagement with the student union. Yet others have used external frameworks, such as the Student Futures Manifesto developed by Mary Curnock Cook’s UPP Commission.

But none of these are easy things to do and all of them run the risk of solving one problem whilst creating others: block-timetabling makes life logistically easier for commuter students, but probably also makes it more difficult for them to join extra- or co-curricular activities; professionalising student support means students get better and more consistent responses, but can weaken the relationship between academic staff and students. All this involves careful analysis and thought, but these four questions should be on any leadership agenda:

• Do we really understand how student expectations are segmented? 

The result of recent rapid changes in the composition of student cohorts is not simply greater diversity, but segmented expectations of university experience, engagement and outcomes. Increasingly, student experience needs to be thought of in plural, not singular terms. University leadership teams need to ask themselves hard questions about how well they understand, and are set up to respond to these differences – and that also means thinking about how the articulation of the offer might need to be more differentiated or disaggregated to make different student groups feel valued and supported.

• Can we learn from others to speed up our response rate and feedback loops?

There is a lot to be learnt not simply from private providers of services – we all have changing expectations of how we engage with the organisations who provide services for us – but from private providers in higher education. Many are laser focused on delivering value in precisely defined ways, with short feedback loops and rapid response mechanisms. University leadership teams need to ask themselves how well they are learning from private providers as they think about responding to student expectations.

• How well are we using routine engagement data to shape academic and professional services?

Established arrangements for collecting feedback – module evaluations and focus groups for example – need to be supplemented by rigorous use of data which provide analytic insights into student behaviour. There is almost certainly a wealth of data available to academic and student support teams to understand the experiences of students

• Is our data governance and flow fit for purpose?

A lot of this comes down to the availability and use of data – how it is sourced, presented, and shared. Some universities are making impressive and increasingly mature use of data analytics and working imaginatively with providers. There are a range of tools on the market. But best practice is not routine practice, and in too many universities data is poorly managed and presented, and is not being used to design and evaluate engagement.

As university leaders think about strategic positioning for the next decade, they need to think equally hard about how they will engage more diverse student populations impacted in such different ways by recent changes. There is something fundamental here about the sustainability of institutions, which ultimately depends not only on how well they can persuade more students that what they are paying for is designed around their often disparate needs, but also on how well and how consistently they can deliver that.

By Chris Husbands and Janice Kay

February 28th 2025