PGRs would also like to feel part of a community

A new feature of this year’s PRES – the inclusion of a question bank on community and belonging measures – has thrown up some eye-catching results.

Responses overall from postgraduate research (PGR) students to this bucket of questions here are not great – 62 per cent reported that they had a “sense of belonging”, and only 57 per cent that they felt part of a community of PGRs.

Overall PGR satisfaction has held steady at around 80 per cent through the decade the PRES survey has been running, with the 2023 figure being 79 per cent. Around 10 per cent disagreed that they were satisfied, with “neither agree nor disagree” retained as an option, unlike with the new NSS.

Which might make it sound like the lower scores on belonging and community don’t matter, perhaps? That postgraduate research students are less motivated by how welcome and involved they feel, being primarily interested in the academic development and/or professional prospects that stem from research?

In fact, the interesting correlation analysis that Advance HE makes a habit of including shows this isn’t really the case. Feeling a sense of belonging and feeling part of a community are two of the three measures most strongly correlated with overall satisfaction which also received a rating of less than 65 per cent positive (the other one is whether the institution values and responds to feedback).

In fact, “I feel a sense of belonging at my institution” has the strongest correlation with overall satisfaction of any item in the survey, by quite some way.

From here to down under

It should be a cause for cheer among those who value gathering postgraduate survey data that 105 institutions participated in the PRES this year – although it’s mildly important to note that four of these were from Australia. The intention here is to produce a benchmark for UK institutions to compare with, and presumably to seek out further Australian participation in future surveys.

PRES works via participating providers paying to receive institutional-level results for more granular analysis, and so we don’t get any breakdown of how results vary by institution’s size, research intensity, or even hemisphere of the Earth – presumably though, if the Australian results had diverged too much from the UK ones, this would have been flagged.

In total 37,661 students completed the survey (of something in the order of 110,000 PGRs in the sector, in the UK at least), a massive increase on last year when it was less than 14,000. There’s a cyclical element here, with many institutions participating once every two years, which is how the survey was originally conducted.

Improvements to the sample size aside, it’s of course worth pointing out that participation in the survey is on a self-selecting basis, with PGRs asked by their institution to fill in the survey, but no guarantee that the results are fully representative of the entire postgraduate research population.

The gaps persist

Other new features of this year’s edition are questions on whether respondents are “first in family” students (no particular impact on satisfaction scores, interestingly) and whether UK respondents received free school meals. For this latter category of student, overall satisfaction is five percentage points lower.

Last year saw a noticeable gap in satisfaction rates between students with disabilities and their peers, and this has persisted. The disparity in overall satisfaction is 12 per cent, and for the question of whether one’s institution values and responds to student feedback, it’s a whopping 17 per cent (44 vs 61 per cent).

The ethnicity gap is also pretty stark, especially between white and black PGRs – the latter were also a lot less likely to say they had been offered teaching or other developmental opportunities.

Some 28 per cent of respondents had considered leaving in the 2022–23 academic year (the survey was conducted between February and May 2023), with a noticeable rise in those citing financial concerns – from 12 per cent in 2022’s PRES to 17 per cent this time around. It’s clear that cost of living pressures are threatening student continuation at all levels, but then we knew that already.