In 2022/23 there were estimated to be over **** million students enrolled in higher education courses in the United Kingdom, which was the highest number of enrolled students during this provided time period. Although the number of students in the UK fell from *** million in 2011/12 to **** by 2014/15, this trend reversed in subsequent years, reaching the peak in the most recent year. Largest UK universities At ******* students, the mainly remote, Open University had the largest number of students enrolled among UK-based higher education institutions in 2022/23. University College London had the second-highest number of students at ******, followed by the University of Manchester at ******. At the UK's two oldest and most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge, there were ******, and ****** students respectively. The university with the most students in Scotland was the University of Glasgow at *******students, with Wales' being Cardiff University at ****** students, and Northern Ireland's Ulster University having ****** students. Student Debt in the UK For students that graduated from English universities in 2024, the average student loan debt incurred over the course of their studies was over ****** British pounds. Although students graduated with less debt from universities in Wales, Northern Ireland, and especially Scotland, this too has been growing recently. In 2024, students from Scottish Universities graduated with an average of ****** pounds of debt, compared with ****** in Wales, and ****** in Northern Ireland. The overall outstanding student loan debt in the UK reached over *** billion pounds in 2023/24, with the vast majority of this debt from students who studied in England.

In 2022/23, the Open University, which focuses on remote learning, had approximately 140,215 students enrolled on courses, the highest in the UK during that academic year. After the Open University, University College London had the highest number of students in the UK, at 51,810, while the University of Manchester had the second-highest, at 46,860. The UK's oldest university, The University of Oxford, had approximately 27,340 students studying there.

This statistic shows the application rate, by ethnic group, of 18-year-old pupils from English state schools to United Kingdom (UK) universities in 2013. Of pupils of Chinese origin, 56 percent applied to a university in 2013, the highest application rate of any ethnic group.

This study is comprised by the data collected for a wider project exploring the historical relationship between higher education and the UK economy. The project sought to provide a long-term explanation of the relationships between funding, widening access and socio-economic aspects of higher education. Three main areas were considered:
-The provision of an in-depth historical account and analysis of the numbers and extent of students and staff for the purposes of evaluating the main characteristics of UK higher education development back the 1920s.
-The provision of an in-depth historical account and evaluation of levels and structures of income and expenditure in higher education
-The interpretation of these data with reference to major socio-economic indicators.

The sample comprises of undergraduate social science students who were studying on introductory statistics courses at twelve UK universities (n=677). The data were collected anonymously between 2015 and 2017. The main mode of data collection was via a survey questionnaire that was completed in class during teaching. Where it was not possible to administer a physical questionnaire in a class setting there was an online version of the survey questionnaire available. Survey results were linked with final course grade via the student number. The research received ethical approval from the University of Edinburgh. The survey data collection tool was based on a previous survey by Payne, G., Hodgkinson, L., Williams, M. (2009). SN 6137. This survey tool was adapted to include a validated measure of statistics anxiety, the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale, along with a number of other variables of interest.

This Statistical First Release (SFR) is the annual first release of HESA Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) data. In previous years it has been titled Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education in the United Kingdom. This release focuses on all publicly funded UK HE providers and the University of Buckingham. It also includes, for 2016/17, data for leavers from HE level courses at further education (FE) colleges in Wales (of which there were 355 leavers in the DLHE target population). All are fully subscribed members of HESA.

There were 296 higher education institutions in the United Kingdom in the 2022/23 academic year, compared with the previous year when there were 288.

In the 2022/23 academic year, 30 percent of undergraduates obtaining their degree were awarded a degree with first-class honors, the highest possible grade for UK graduates. Almost half of all students achieved an upper second or 2.1, with 20 percent obtaining a lower second or 2.2, and just four percent of graduates obtained a third, the lowest possible pass grade. The share of UK students graduating with a first-class degree has increased significantly in this time period, while the share of students obtaining a 2.2 has fallen the most in the same time period. GCSE and A-Level grades also on the rise Higher grades for the UK's main qualification for high school students, the general certificate of secondary education (GCSE), have also increased recently. In 1988 for example, approximately 8.4 percent of GCSE entries received the highest grade, compared with 21.8 percent in 2024. This is also the case to a lesser-extent for advanced level GCSE results (A-Levels), with the share of entries being awarded an A or A* increasing from 17.8 percent in 2000 to 27.8 percent in 2024. There is no consensus on if these improvements are due to increased ability, or to grade inflation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, grades in the UK were a lot higher than in other years. This was due to teacher and tutor assessments being giving a higher weighting than normal, with exams being postponed or cancelled completely. The UK's top universities Britain's oldest and most famous universities, Cambridge and Oxford, remained the two highest-ranked universities in the UK in 2025, with the London School of Economics finishing third. According to the ranking, the University of St Andrews was the top university outside the south of England, with Durham University being the highest-ranked university in the north of England. The largest university in terms of enrolled students was the mainly remote focused Open University, which had over 140,000 students in 2022/23. Among universities that mainly taught on-campus, University College London had the most students enrolled, at almost 52,000.

In 2022/23 the overall annual expenditure of higher education institutions in the United Kingdom amounted to approximately 48.6 billion British pounds, an increase on the previous year.

This dataset presents a cluster analysis of UK universities based on four synthetic environments: social, cultural, physical and economic. These were developed based on variables that represented an educational ecosystem of well-being. The cluster analysis was initially linked to the LSYPE-Secure dataset using the UKPRNs (i.e. higher education institutional number) and hence the cluster analysis used data from around 2009-2012 to represent Wave 6 and Wave 7 of the LSYPE-Secure dataset. The cluster analysis was based on using a variety of variables available from HESA and the Office for Students (OfS) to represent these environments, for example: Social: had demographics of students and staff including ethnicity and sex Cultural: had data on research and teaching scores Economic: had data on student: staff ratio and expenditure Physical: had data related to the built and natural environment including residential sites, blue and green spaces

The CPC-ONS-UUK Survey of Graduating International Students (SoGIS) is a collaborative project between the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) at the University of Southampton, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Universities UK (UUK). SoGIS wave 1 collected detailed information from international students in UK Higher Education in their final year of study. SoGIS wave 2 is a follow-up survey administered to a subsample of students who participated in wave 1. The survey sampled both undergraduate and postgraduate, EU and non-EU finalist students. SoGIS Wave 1 contains 3560 responses from a sample of 101,049 (response rate 3.5%). SoGIS Wave 2 contains 563 responses from a sample of 1,517 (37% response rate). SoGIS provides valuable information about the post-study intentions, certainty of these intentions, travel patterns, use of public services, and working patterns whilst studying of international students approaching course completion. The survey increases our understanding of students migratory and employment intentions after studying.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) is investigating how and why our population is changing and what this means for people, communities and governments. The Centre is a joint partnership between the Universities of Southampton, St. Andrews, and Stirling. Our research agenda is planned in collaboration with the Office for National Statistics and the National Records of Scotland. CPC is a founding partner of Population Europe, the network of Europe's leading research centres in the field of policy-relevant population studies.

The pattern of our lives is continuously changing; many of us now remain in education for longer than in the past, we delay becoming parents and we are living longer than ever before. The households we live in are more complex with more step- and half-kin but also more of us live alone at some point in our lives. Many of us move around locally, nationally and internationally for work and family. Our behaviours interact to create the society in which we live. CPC research aims to understand the causes and consequences of changes in births, deaths, relationships and migration to enable policy makers and planners to know how, when and where to respond. By finding out how our population is changing we can improve the world in which we live.

CPC research is organised around five thematic areas: 1. Fertility and family change 2. Increasing longevity and the changing life course 3. New mobilities and migration 4. Understanding intergenerational relations and exchange 5. Integrated demographic estimation and forecasting

These thematic areas explicitly recognise the dynamic interaction of the individual components of population change both with each other and with economic and social processes.

This large, international dataset contains survey responses from N = 12,570 students from 100 universities in 35 countries, collected in 21 languages. We measured anxieties (statistics, mathematics, test, trait, social interaction, performance, creativity, intolerance of uncertainty, and fear of negative evaluation), self-efficacy, persistence, and the cognitive reflection test, and collected demographics, previous mathematics grades, self-reported and official statistics grades, and statistics module details. Data reuse potential is broad, including testing links between anxieties and statistics/mathematics education factors, and examining instruments’ psychometric properties across different languages and contexts. Note that the pre-registration can be found here: https://osf.io/xs5wf

The student sample for this research was selected from YouthSight’s Student Panel. Based on HESA statistics, the sample comprises national representation of gender, course year, and university type. The data is weighted on these factors. After fieldwork, the sample collected was checked for quality, and any ‘straight-liners’ were removed from the final total. The total student sample size is 2,153 respondents.Fieldwork was carried out between 29th July and 2nd August 2019.The survey instrument was developed by reviewing the limited number of studies and surveys on freedom of expression, consultations with colleagues and informed by our own experience. This resulted in the inclusion of seven comparative statements that are routinely used in surveys on freedom of expression in US universities, and a 15-item Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which enables the data to be interrogated by underlying moral profile. The definition of freedom of expression uses the framing adopted by King’s College London, which was developed through extensive consultation with the Students’ Union.

The project, based at the University of Greenwich, UK and Stellenbosch University, South Africa, aimed to examine epidemiologic transitions by identifying and quantifying the drivers of change in CVD risk in the middle-income country of South Africa compared to the high-income nation of England. The project produced a harmonised dataset of national surveys measuring CVD risk factors in South Africa and England for others to use in future work. The harmonised dataset includes microdata from nationally-representative surveys in South Africa derived from the Demographic and Health Surveys, National Income Dynamics Study, South Africa National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health, covering 11 cross-sections and approximately 156,000 individuals aged 15+ years, representing South Africa’s adult population from 1998 to 2017.

Data for England come from 17 Health Surveys for England (HSE) over the same time period, covering over 168,000 individuals aged 16+ years, representing England’s adult population.

In 2024, 44 percent of people in the European Union aged between 25 and 34 had a degree. For the population aged between 20 and 24 as a whole, the figure was 19.4 percent.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The aims of this project were to:

• understand the demographic changes that United Kingdom local ethnic populations are presently experiencing and are likely to experience in the remainder of the 21st century
• understand the impact that international migration is having on the size and ethnic composition of UK local populations
• understand the role that differences in fertility between the UK's ethnic groups plays in shaping current and future trends
• understand the role that mortality differences between ethnic groups is playing in the changing demography of the UK's local populations
• understand how the ethnic diversity of UK local populations is changing and likely to change in the future
• deliver the projections as a resource for use by social science in the UK
• build capacity in the analysis of demographic change through the development of young and middle career researchers
• tap into the best practice internationally to benefit the UK social science community.

To achieve the project aims, the objectives were to:

• build projections of the populations of ethnic groups for UK local areas
• use the population projection model to explore alternative futures.

The project built a model for projecting the ethnic group populations of UK Local Authorities (LAs), which handles 352 LAs, 16 ethnic groups, 102 ages and 2 sexes. To drive the projections, estimates of the components of ethnic change were prepared for 2001-7. A new method produced UK estimates of ethnic life expectancy, ranging from 82 years for Chinese women to 77 for Pakistani. A future 2% decline in mortality per annum was assumed. Ethnic fertility estimates showed that only Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis had total fertility rates above replacement. Small declines in fertility were forecast. New estimates of the local distribution of immigration were made, using administrative data, because of concerns about official figures. The ethnicity of both immigrants and emigrants for local areas was projected. Estimates were constructed of the ethnic group probabilities for internal in- and out-migration for LAs using 2001 Census data. These probabilities were assumed constant in the future, as migration was stable between 2001 and 2008. Five projections were produced. Two benchmark projections, using constant inputs from 2001-2, forecast the UK population would be 62 and 56 million in 2051.The official projection reports 77 million. The Trend projection, aligned to ONS assumptions projected 78 million for 2051. Using revised assumptions 80 million was projected in a fourth projection. When the model for emigration was changed the projected population was only 71 million. All projections showed ageing and dispersion of ethnic minorities. By 2051 the UK will have a larger, more diverse and integrated population.

For further information about the project, see documentation and the What happens when international migrants settle? Ethnic group population trends and projections for UK local areas under alternative scenarios ESRC award page.


Main Topics:

For full details of the individual files (and topics covered) within the study, see documentation files '6777_list_of_files.xlsx' and '6777_fileinformation.pdf' in the Documentation table below.

Users should note that this study is very large - c.8GB. Multiple files have been created for download, according to the type of compilation - benchef, bencher, trendef, uptapef and uptaper (see 6777_fileinformation.pdf for details). To obtain all files contained within the study, users should download all zip files.