Response to IHEC report – ‘Data Matters in Higher Education’
Jisc welcomes the report from the International Higher Education Commission which confirms the value of work underway to improve data on international students and graduates.
The Data Matters in Higher Education report highlights the importance of high quality and timely data on international higher education provision as a significant UK export market. The report’s recommendations align with work already underway by Jisc in the collection and publication of data.
Jisc is working towards the collection of in-year data from UK higher education providers. This has been, and remains, a key goal of Jisc (and HESA) since the inception of the Data Futures programme. Introduction of in-year student data continues to be discussed with the UK’s funding and regulatory bodies. We anticipate they will want to consider the data submission burden on HE providers, the lessons from last years’ Data Futures programme, their business requirements for in-year data, and the need for timely data on which providers and other stakeholders can act.
The Graduate Outcomes survey is the largest annual social survey in the UK with over 380,000 responses to the most recent survey. It contacts all international graduates for whom universities can supply a contact email address. Early iterations of the survey found contacting non-EU domiciled graduates by telephone to be poor value for money relative to the survey responses generated by that method. Response rates for non-EU domiciled graduates are therefore lower than for UK and EU domiciled graduates, but remain representative of the international graduate population.
China contributes the largest share of international students in UK higher education but presents the greatest challenges to contacting graduates. Jisc is currently working to improve Graduate Outcomes survey response rates from China through collaboration with the British Council, using their social media channels to increase awareness and encourage engagement with the survey. Notwithstanding these challenges, Graduate Outcomes remains one of the best resources for information on international students in the world.
The report highlights the demand for actionable data and Jisc shares this aspiration. We are currently investing in a programme to modernise our data publications and another to predictively model international student numbers specifically. The latter project, with input from one of the IHEC report’s authors, makes unique use of the high-quality data held by Jisc to produce stability indices for entry routes, demand factors, price of uncertainty, and subjects at risk.
We particularly welcome recommendations in the report that emphasise collaboration between bodies and the collation and exploitation of currently disparate data sources. This has been a feature of HESA and Jisc’s work and future planning for many years and we look forward to applying our long experience and knowledge to realising this aspiration.