Fewer undergraduates enrolled at Oxford University in 2023-24 than in the previous reporting year, new data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) reveals. A decline of 500 enrolled undergraduate students compared to 2022-2023 was partially offset by a modest increase of 320 in the postgraduate student total. Nonetheless, the overall number of matriculated students across the University fell for the first time since 2015/16.
The rate of increase in the number of undergraduates was already beginning to plateau since a jump of over 1,000 students following Covid-19 disruption to A-level marking in 2020. The total number of Oxford students in 2023/24 stood at 27,160.
Elsewhere in the country, it was postgraduate numbers which declined, with undergraduate attendance seeing a very minimal increase. Just over 30,000 fewer students were enrolled overall at UK universities, in the wake of university leaders highlighting the financial challenges facing the sector in the wake of dwindling numbers, with critical implications for the government’s stated growth mission. This is the first decline in student numbers in the UK higher education sector for a decade.
Dr Hollie Chandler, Director of Policy at the Russell Group, an association of influential British universities, told the Education Select Committee last Tuesday: “We’re trying to protect the quality of our education and our research activities. The scale of the deficits we’re facing are so large that efficiency measures alone are not going to be able to address them.”
The government raised tuition fees last year in an attempt to solve part of the funding problem.
Meanwhile, demographic shifts are changing the financing landscape. The number of UK-domiciled students decreased both at Oxford and across the country.
An especially large drop was also observed in the number of EU students, the number of whom studying in the UK has halved since 2020. Oxford continues to have the fourth most EU students, only behind UCL, Edinburgh, and King’s College London. For the number of international students in total, Oxford ranks 19th in the UK.
