menu icon
Book your open day visit nowClick to book open day

Where does our information come from

HESA Student Record
The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is responsible for collecting and analysing data on students and Universities in the UK.

PostgraduateSearch institution and course pages use student gender, age, and domicile data from the HESA Student Record.

Entry qualification information contained within the student record is used within the What Did Others Do and I Want to Be tools to provide a picture of the most common subjects studied by students prior to starting a degree course. Only data for first degree students is considered for the calculations used within the tools. This data is categorised by subject using the JACS Principal Subjects. This list has been slightly modified for use with the tools to improve the user experience. For example, Pre-Clinical Medicine and Clinical Medicine have been combined into one subject.

All HESA Student Record data displayed on the site is subject to data display thresholds, where a cohort must consist of at least 52.5 students in order to be displayed on the site. If a cohort contains less than 52.5 students, then an 'insufficient data' message will be displayed on the site. For example, if only 20 students study a particular subject at a specific university, then the data will not be shown on the site. The data currently held on the site relates to students who started their first year in 2016/17 and 2017/18 academic years. The institution related data was last updated on PostgraduateSearch in August 2021 and next update is due in March 2022, which will include data for the 2019/20 academic year.

< Back

Course Data
UCAS provides the basic course data including entry requirements, study modes, course duration and start dates for UCAS and CUKAS members as well as other Higher Education Institutions. PostgraduateSearch also collects additional undergraduate content information to enhance the user experience of the site. This includes:

  • more detailed summaries
  • course module data
  • application information
  • entry requirements and course fees.

In addition to that, and to make course comparisons easier for potential users, PostgraduateSearch displays 'per year' course fees. This means that where UCAS have provided overall fees, our system automatically converts these into per year fees for display on our sites.

UCAS updates are supplied and loaded on to the site on a weekly basis. PostgraduateSearch-collected higher education data is maintained by each institution and updated as often as needed but at least once a year.

< Back

University Reviews
Member reviews are written by the users of this website. We hope that reviews by students who have attended the uni will give you more of a flavour of the place you are hoping to spend the next few years. The opinions expressed in the reviews are very much those of individual users of PostgraduateSearch, they are not the views of either PostgraduateSearch or Hotcourses Ltd.
< Back