Today, we publish the 2025 Student Equality Data Dashboards. Peny Sotiropoulou, Advance HE Mixed-Methods Researcher, points to the data highlights
About this year’s publication
This is the 18th year Advance HE has published student equality data for the UK higher education (HE) sector.
Following the inaugural 2024 Student Equality Data Dashboards’ publication, which launched in November 2025, the 2025 iteration is the second publication following the transformed layout of interactive Tableau dashboards, which provides users with the flexibility to tailor the data to their needs, exploring what is most relevant to them, while also enabling comparisons across time. This publication is based on student data derived by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA/Jisc) for the 2021-22 to 2023-24 academic years.
For a short preview of how to navigate the dashboards, please refer to this video produced for last year’s publication. In the video, Dr Panagiota (Peny) Sotiropoulou, Advance HE Researcher and the Student Equality Data Dashboards’ lead, gives a short overview of the new layout for this publication and assists users with how to navigate the dashboards, using some practical examples.
Additionally, please have a look at the recording of the webinar AHE Student Equality Data Dashboards – Introduction and Key Insights we hosted on Tuesday 17 March 2026, based on the 2024 publication of the dashboards. In this webinar, Peny Sotiropoulou guided attendees through navigating the dashboards while presenting a series of highlighted findings. Then, two sector experts, Pavel Ovseiko from the University of Oxford, and Louise Whitman from Durham University, shared their insights on how they have explored the dashboards to extract meaningful data and use those to enhance their practice.
For more information regarding the data featured on the dashboards, please refer to the ‘About the data dashboards’ file here, and for more information regarding how to use the actual dashboards, please refer to the ‘User guidance’ dashboard here.
To give feedback or ask questions, please use the following email address: [insights@advance-he.ac.uk]
Data highlights
Overall student population
- 2023-24 marks the first instance since 2014-15, in which the overall student population in UK HE shows a decrease (from a total of 2,889,935 in 2022-23 to 2,848,240 in 2023/24). While first-degree undergraduate students kept on increasing (from 1,878,810 in 2022-23 to 1,888,970 in 2023-24), students in all other level of studies decreased, with the biggest change noted in the total count of postgraduate taught students (38,065 student decrease between 2022/23 and 2023/24).
- Between 2022-23 and 2023-24, the overall population of non-EU students in taught postgraduate programmes has decreased from 370,810 to 347,745 (6.6%), whereas non-EU postgraduate taught entrants decreased by 30,530, or 10.3%.
(N.B. The numbering in the titles below refers to the relevant dashboard number.)
Age
- The proportion of first-degree undergraduate students aged 36 and over has increased year-on-year since 2021-22 (from 8.4% of the total to 9.4%). This rise is much the same when looking just at first degree undergraduate entrants (from 8.4% of the total in 2021-22 to 9.6% in 2023-24). This is evidence of the established presence of mature students at the first-degree undergraduate level in UK HE. Despite the increase in the population of mature students over time, their continuation rates and degree awards continue to be lower than those of their younger peers, albeit the gaps are closing.
Disability
- Between 2021-22 and 2022-23, continuation gaps between non-disabled and disabled students disappeared completely. However, when looking at individual disabled student groups, this is not a universal pattern. Specifically, in 2022-23, full-time students with mental health conditions had the lowest proportion of continuation to the second year of their first-degree undergraduate studies (84.3%), compared to both their non-disabled peers and all other groups of disabled students.
The work of improving disabled students’ experiences is already underway in many institutions, and the Disabled Student Commitment offers a focused, evidence-based framework to keep that momentum going more widely. With the recent OfS announcement around the development and publication of a statement of expectations relating to disability, which will include expectations relating to mental health as a disability, we expect that the sector will be able to support those students better in the years to come
Peny Sotiropoulou, Mixed-Methods Researcher
EDI progress in postgraduate research enrolments in Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) subject areas
Positive trends can be identified in the diversification of postgraduate research enrolments in SET subject areas. Specifically, the proportion of female, disabled and Black postgraduate research students in SET subject areas has been increasing year on year since 2021/22 as follows:
- The proportion of first-year female postgraduate researchers has increased from 49.9% to 51.4% of the total. The trend is almost identical, when looking at the entire postgraduate research population (female students’ representation rose from 47.8% of the total in 2021/22 to 50.2% in 2023/24).
- The proportion of first-year disabled postgraduate researchers has increased from 13.2% to 15.8% of the total. The trend is almost identical, when looking at the entire postgraduate research population (disabled students’ representation rose from 12.8% of the total in 2021/22 to 16.1% in 2023/24).
- The proportion of first-year Black postgraduate researchers has increased from 3.7% to 4.3% of the total. The trend is almost identical, when looking at the entire postgraduate research population (Black students’ representation rose from 3.9% of the total in 2021/22 to 4.2% in 2023/24).
This is evidence that the targeted policy initiatives taken by the sector have yielded some positive results, although there is still a long way to achieve proportionate representation for all.
Ethnicity (please note that this data is only available for UK-domiciled students)
Overall remarks (representation)
- The proportion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic students has been increasing year on year (from 27.1% of the total in 2021/22 to 29.7% in 2023/24). This increase has been keenly reflected across all levels of study, with the highest proportion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic students found at the first-degree undergraduate level. Black African students are those showing the highest increase (from 6.1% of the total student population in 2021/22 to 6.8% in 2023/24).
Continuation
- Despite the increase noted in the Black, Asian and minority ethnic UK-domiciled first-degree undergraduate population, there is still a gap in the continuation rates of this group compared to their White peers, with the latter outperforming the former. Students from other Black backgrounds have the worst continuation rates across all ethnic groups since 2021-22.
Degree awarding gap
- The widening of the ethnicity degree awarding gap noted between 2021/22 and 2022/23 slightly closed in 2023/24 (from a 12.6 percentage point difference in 2022/23 to 11.5 percentage points in 2023/24).
Similar to continuation rates, Black African students and those from other Black backgrounds continue to have the lowest proportion of undergraduate qualifiers awarded with a First/2:1 (60.5% and 60.7%, respectively), whereas Chinese qualifiers regained the top position from their White peers, following what happened in 2021/22 (82.0% of Chinese qualifiers were awarded a First/2:1 compared to 81.4% of White qualifiers in 2023/24).
Intersectional considerations help us to better understand where the biggest gaps are – for 2023/24, Chinese female qualifiers have the highest proportion of undergraduate qualifiers awarded with a First/2:1 (84.0%), whereas Black African male qualifiers have the lowest (58.0%).
Graduate outcomes
In 2022/23, White graduates were still those with the highest proportion in full-time employment (61.0%) and with the lowest proportion of unemployment (4.0% of all White graduates were unemployed 15 months after completing their qualification). Reflecting the continuation and degree award disparities, graduates from Black other backgrounds had the lowest proportion of full-time employees (46.9%), whereas Bangladeshi graduates were those with the highest percentage of unemployment (11.2% of all Bangladeshi graduates are unemployed 15 months after completing their qualification).
We are delighted to see the sector’s continuous engagement with this transformed product, which since its publication has averaged more than 2000 views per month. Our ambition is to establish these dashboards as the ‘go to’ place for all stakeholders interested in data exploration related to the UK HE student population and the aforementioned initial engagement statistics seems to indicate we are in the right track. We want to make sure that we keep on delivering what the sector needs and finds useful through these dashboards, so, we would like to encourage feedback from all dashboard users
David Bass, Director of Inclusion and Governance, and Peny Sotiropoulou, Mixed-Methods Researcher
