Main takeaways from the Unite Students Insight Report 2019

Unite Students, the student residence provider, has teamed up with HEPI, the independent higher education think tank, to produce an insights report on the views of applicants and students in 2019. 

Although organised by Unite Students, it’s not a survey about student accommodation. Beyond this, the student sample that was used for the main quantitative surveys (of 2535 applicants and 2573 first year students) was sampled according to HESA student population averages and then taken from the YouthSite panel. It wasn’t taken from those living in halls of residences, thus making the results useful for institutions with high proportions of commuter students / students living at home.

Similar to earlier this year, when HEPI teamed up with the Higher Education Academy to release their Student Academic Experience Survey results, I’ve written a brief summary of the main findings of the report. You can find the full report online, but here are my top 10 takeaways:

1.      Students and applicants are most focused on finding a job that they’re passionate about and being financially stable. Only 15% of applicants and 13% of students have an ideal of becoming wealthy.

2.      Why start a degree? The research found that the main reason was about learning (52%), rather than financial reward (36%). This echoes recent findings earlier this month from a ComRes survey, where only 34% of students interviewed said that their primary reason for going to university was to get a higher salary.

3.      Although there is a higher proportion of students who say that they want to do a degree for the learning, when it comes to defining a successful student experience, professional skills are just as important.

4.      Students generally see the world as more challenging and hostile than it was for their parents, and a large proportion (69%) perceive higher education as their only option to achieve the life that they want.

5.      When it comes to applying to university, applicants trust current or former students the most (27%), even more than their own friends (23%). University websites and prospectuses are the least trusted source of information that was prompted within the survey (16%).

6.      Young people are much more accepting of their mental health than previous generations (47% feel that it is part of who they are), however almost as many still feel it carries stigma (46%). Less than a quarter trust that their university will be able to provide them with the right level of support (23%), which is compounded by over half (52%) seeing mental health issues as something that they have to deal with themselves.

7.      However, once students have started at university, many students find that mental health support is better than expected. 37% said that the quality of support was better than they had expected.

8.      Applicants generally have reliable expectations of what they will do in Freshers’ week, as there are very few areas where their expectations are different from the reality (one being that a whopping 64% of applicants expected to attend a lecture during Freshers' week, whereas only 46% did).

9.      When it comes to learning and teaching, applicants expect that the most useful way that they will learn will be through one-to-one sessions with tutors. However, once they arrive, students find that they learn a lot more than expected through lectures and independent learning.

10.  Unsurprisingly, when asked about what should replace lectures if they were discontinued (which would seem odd, given how highly new students rated them in the previous question), students favoured other face-to-face forms of learning (55%) compared to digital methods (30%).

Hope that you found this brief summary helpful. You can find full details of the report on the Unite Students website. Jenny Shaw, Student Experience Director at Unite Students, has also written a piece for Wonkhe that focuses on the mental health findings in the report.