Much like a yearbook, the HESA statistics give us a comprehensive picture of what has been going on in UK higher education over the past academic year – and for the UK international education industry, 2016-17 was arguably not the most exciting year.
Enrolments from non-EU countries are down 1%, and while student numbers from the EU show a 6% increase, the figures were collected too soon to detect a potential Brexit effect.
Universities UK International talks of ‘stagnation’.
Asked to comment on the most noticeable trends, HESA press and data protection officer Simon Kemp said: “The overall percentage of non-UK domicile students at UK universities in 2016/17 was 19% – a proportion that has remained roughly constant for the last four years.”
But there are other trends that hide in the figures, offering food for thought and pointing at potential areas of development.
For example, students are not evenly enrolled across degree levels. “44% of international students in 2016/17 were studying for postgraduate qualifications, compared to 19% of UK domicile students,” Kemp said.
The PIE News has distilled the HESA figures into a set of graphs, below, which look at the distribution of home and international students across the UK; the fluctuation of EU and non-EU source markets over the past few years; and a top 10 of the most diverse universities, by number and by proportion of international students.
Graphs are interactive and are meant to be explored by clicking on the arrows, or values below the graph to view different regions’ data, or compare selected sending nations.
You can find a more detailed story on these figures in our News section, here.
