Hit or miss? Online student number targets
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The current financial situation in UK higher education is compelling universities to explore various avenues to attract students and ultimately increase their income. The primary mitigation for an increasingly dire set of financial conditions has been to attract more high-fee-paying international students to on-campus study.
However, it's debatable whether there is any more headroom here, given government policy changes and narratives that are making the UK a less appealing place to study for those from other countries.
It would be overly simplistic to say that more UK higher education institutions (HEIs) are exclusively exploring online education as a salve for their financial difficulties. That is certainly a significant driver for some, but there are other motivators, such as modernisation through evolving course formats to match the changing ways in which people want to engage with higher education.
Whether the driver is financial, stemming from an increasing desperation to generate more income, or whether it is because online education is seen as having a strong future trajectory, any moves into online education come with student recruitment and student number growth targets.
Targeting ROI
New entrants, in particular, will set ambitions and gauge the number of online students they aim to recruit over time. For the more financially driven institutions, achieving these numbers is crucial to ensure that the goal of generating income to strengthen the bottom line is met. In that sense, it's a target of a different quality from a wealthier HEI that has now decided to invest in online education.
Overall, the current financial climate has brought return on investment (ROI) into much sharper focus for those venturing into online education. There was a time when UK HEIs began developing MOOCs, and the importance placed on ROI seemed minimal or non-existent. For most, this move into online education was a nice little side gig that kept them on trend.
However, there is now greater seriousness and strategic importance being given to developing online education portfolios, largely driven by current financial realities.
For newer, first-time, or newly serious entrants into the online education market, student recruitment and student number growth targets are a key part of the ROI and income generation calculation.
An increasing number of UK HEIs fall into this category with ambitions to grow or increase their online student numbers into the thousands in the coming years. I’ve seen online student number growth targets ranging from between 3,000 to 5,000 online students in 5 years or up to 10,000 students over a longer period.
This ambition is laudable, but when I encounter targets like this I sometimes find myself pondering where these targets have originated and what they are based on. I also wonder whether these growth targets have been calculated by HEI’s themselves or whether third parties have told them this is a number they can realistically scale to over those time periods.
I also wonder, given the state of many UK HEIs finances, whether institutions are all too ready to accept overly ambitious projections of online student recruitment and growth. A bit like a gambler down on their luck who is offered a good betting tip.
Time will obviously tell with respect to these targets; however, it seems questionable as to whether a spread of UK HEIs can all uniformly grow their online student numbers into the thousands in the coming years.
Past precedents and other examples
Although there are question marks about whether the rising tide of overall online student growth will lift every boat, it's also worth noting that growing online student numbers into the thousands is not unachievable.
Nor is it a new ambition. There are a number of UK HEIs, as far back as 20 years ago, that began scaling up their online distance student numbers. For some, those numbers have plateaued or declined, while for others, they are mostly steadily increasing year-on-year.
If you look back ten years to the 2014/15 academic year and focus exclusively on online postgraduate taught students (PGT), what you find is that there were seven UK HEIs with over 4,000 online PGT students across domestic and international markets.
Two of which are the Open University and the University of London, who are online distance universities. Discounting them as specialist online universities leaves us with five UK HEIs that, while being predominantly on-campus focused, have in the past grown their online student numbers into the thousands.
This group includes the University of Liverpool, University of Leicester, University of Manchester, Heriot-Watt University, and the University of Dundee. One of the most notable institutions in this group in terms of past growth is the University of Liverpool. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data from that year, they had reached over 10,000 online students.
Unsurprisingly, it took some time for Liverpool to grow to that number, and they did so via one of the first UK HEI and online programme management (OPM) partnerships. The university's partnership with the US company Laureate Education began around 2004, and from that time, their online PGT student numbers grew to over 6,000 students in 2009/10. Online PGT student numbers continued to grow until they reached 10,000 in 2014/15.
This is one of the most significant examples of online student number growth amongst UK HEIs that are not specialist online universities. However, it would be too simplistic to take this example as proof of the ability of all other UK HEIs to achieve similar growth in similar timescales.
To highlight just two reasons for caution, firstly, there is now much greater competition for online students, and secondly, it is debatable whether OPM companies have the level of capital they had in the past to invest in crucial activities like marketing.
Nevertheless, this is an example of a UK HEI that grew the number of online students to 10,000 in around 10 years, a target that HEIs like the University of Leeds has also stated as a aim in recent years.
There are other examples of UK HEIs that have had this student number target too. As recently as 2019/20, the University of Edinburgh was still reporting that their target for online PGT student numbers was 10,000.
This was after making an initial and significant investment into increasing online distance learning at the postgraduate level from around 2010/11 through committing to funding of £4.5 million over five years.
Since that time, Edinburgh has scaled their number of online students into the thousands, and as of 2022/23, they reported having just under 5,000 online PGT students. They also have built a significant portfolio of upwards of 80 online degrees.
It’s unclear how vigorously the target number of 10,000 students was pursued, whether it remains relevant, and whether there was a timescale associated with it. But for institutions gauging their potential to grow student numbers, it's worth reflecting on this pace of growth over 10 years or so, given this is an institution ranked highly in the UK and internationally, who invested millions of pounds into online education, with a significant number of programmes.
Sustaining online student numbers
What's clear is that growing online student numbers is not straightforward and easy, and even when significant scale is achieved, there's the challenge of continuing to maintain and grow those numbers of students.
Growth isn’t precisely the same as sustainability, and although the extent of competition is much more significant nowadays, there are UK HEIs that have pointed to competition as being one of the factors for a significant decline in their online student numbers in the past.
Perhaps the most significant example of this is one of those universities I mentioned earlier, the University of Leicester. As of 2010/11, they reported having 10,000 international online distance students, but since then, they have experienced a year-on-year decline and as of 2021/22, they had fewer than 1,500. In 2013/14, the university acknowledged that increasing competition for distance learning students played a role in this and attributed some of this challenge to private providers entering the market.
No doubt, there will have been other factors influencing this movement, but if nothing else, examples of big declines in online student numbers should help HEIs reflect upon the potential for growth targets to distract from also building something that maintains student numbers for the long haul.
Are many UK HEIs currently on track?
It's clear that some previous examples point to significant online student number growth being achieved, but there's only so much to extrapolate from those examples.
Reflecting on the targets I mentioned earlier, which were growing online student numbers to 3,000 or 5,000 in 5 years, or 10,000 in 10 years, it's interesting to consider how many UK HEIs that have made more recent moves into online education are on track to achieve similar numbers based on their recent growth levels.
This analysis is not straightforward due to the myriad variables and permutations. However, it is possible to identify a small sample of UK HEIs who made their first serious moves into online education through partnerships with OPM companies.
A simple trend analysis on these HEIs from the inception of their moves into online education does not suggest a significant amount of efficacy for growth targets as high as 5,000 in 5 years or 10,000 in 10 years. This sample includes Russell Group and other research-intensive universities, as well as modern, teaching-intensive universities, spanning different tariff categories.
What seems more reasonable, based on a simple analysis of this sample, is growth closer to 3,000 students in 5 years. However, it's important to note that this analysis is not very sophisticated and treats HEIs in a somewhat unnuanced and homogeneous manner.
The overarching point is that I'm not convinced there is compelling enough evidence to believe that the swath of UK HEIs with targets to grow online student numbers into the thousands will all meet them.
There will clearly be winners and losers, and the worry in the current climate is that HEIs are more susceptible to being seduced by alluring targets and projections that aren’t grounded in reality.
The associated risk is that shorter-term gains are pursued over longer-term sustainability, and moves into online education become akin to buying a high-performing stock that then plummets.
What should now be evident is that online education isn't a passing trend. While some HEIs will need to prioritise income-generating activities, efforts should still be made to balance that necessity with building longer-term capability. Because, as we've seen in the past, once you reach the summit of ambitious growth targets, the only way from there is down.
