Skip to content
The UK's only independent think tank devoted to higher education.

The Student Academic Experience Survey 2020

  • 11 June 2020
  • By Nick Hillman

There has never been a more important moment to ask students in UK higher education institutions what they think about their own lives. The 2019/20 academic year has been characterised by industrial action, a major global health crisis and rapid adverse changes to the graduate labour market.

The Covid-19 pandemic has served to emphasise the benefits of education as an insurance policy against economic adversity as well as the importance of university research in furthering knowledge of how to tackle truly global challenges.

The Student Academic Experience Survey has been running since 2006 and, as every historian knows, some things change and some things stay the same. Over the years, students have done broadly similar levels of academic work (though there are some positive shifts this year), their perceptions of value have fluctuated (and are down a little this year) and their wellbeing has, sadly, fallen consistently (including this year). This 2020 report, authored by Jonathan Neves of Advance HE and Rachel Hewitt of HEPI, explores the same themes as in earlier years with new data and is supplemented by some new topics (such as educational technology).

The full data on which the report is based is available in Excel, either for 2020 alone (with splits shown for the data collected pre- and post-pandemic) or for the whole period from 2012 to 2020: see https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuJT3g7r6jVpgbR1PcqVIKCWlp0wRA?e=XG0VCQ. Please note the multi-year table is a large file and so will need to be downloaded before you open it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *