i-graduate‘s latest International Student Barometer (ISB) involved responses from 122,394 international students in the UK and 249,000 worldwide. It shows high levels of satisfaction with the arrivals experience, learning experience and student support in the UK.

“Where we’ve seen people moving the needle is in terms of managing students’ expectations”

Areas of strong performance include provision of expert lecturers (95.2% were satisfied), multicultural learning (91.1%), student clubs and societies (95.2%), and student advisory (93.6%).

Students were less satisfied with their “careers experience”, however – finding work experience (69.1%) and earning money (64.8%) for example – although the UK still fared better than the global average.

i-graduate’s CEO, Will Archer, told The PIE News that the UK had improved in almost every category since the survey began in 2005, climbing by some 8-10% overall.

“The UK has been benchmarking international student satisfaction longer than any other country,” he said at an i-graduate best practice event in London yesterday.

“Some things are very difficult to change – the geographical location of a university causing problems in terms of transport for instance. But where we’ve seen people moving the needle is in terms of managing students’ expectations: being more straight about issues in their marketing and improving their student support networks.”

He said the move to record international student opinion through surveys such as the ISB, and then act upon the findings, had driven improvement. Solutions included targeted investment or staff development training but were often just “attidudinal”.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that universities need to spend a lot more money on support, just to make sure they are closing the loop between what students are expecting, what they are saying about their experience and how universities are responding to that,” he said.

While on the whole the UK performs better than ISB’s global average, many of its rivals are improving too—starting off where the UK was “five or six years ago, but catching up in about two to three years”, thanks to sharing of best practice. Archer flagged New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Italy.

While on the whole the UK performs better than ISB’s global average, many of its rivals are improving too

Other factors pushing student experience up the agenda include the growing influence of “peer referral” on study abroad decisions via social media (i-graduate says it carries more weight than anything else). Competition between countries to attract international students is also at play.

“The business of international education, as an export, is more important than ever and students genuinely have a world of choice,” said Archer.

“So we have to pay more attention to what legislative changes our competitors make and how we respond. Some countries are being more responsive than others.”