Research
HESA’s core mission is to support the advancement of higher education across all nations of the UK through the data it collects, assures and disseminates.
Strategy and impact
Our Research strategy describes how we undertake research to advance public knowledge and understanding of UK higher education, and to improve our own outputs in the public interest.
Our review of the Impact of research illustrates how we are meeting those aims and aspirations.
Research topics
The design and nature of work
We use Graduate Outcomes survey data to measure one aspect of job quality.
Regional variation in the design and nature of graduate work: a first look (2021-12-07)
Graduate Outcomes : A statistical measure of the design and nature of work (2021-06-08)
Widening participation
Effective measurement of disadvantage to support the WP agenda.
Reaching out: The added value of HESA’s new measure of socioeconomic disadvantage (2022-03-15)
Using Census data to generate a UK-wide measure of disadvantage (2021-10-05)
Year 0: A foundation for widening participation? (2019-05-16)
The graduate premium
The changing gap in earnings between graduates and non-graduates.
Graduate Earnings Premia in the UK: Decline and Fall? (2021-11-23)
How does the return to a degree vary by class of award? (2020-03-10)
Wellbeing and satisfaction
Analysing graduates' self reported success and subjective wellbeing.
Higher education outcomes: How career satisfaction among graduates varies by ethnicity (2020-09-22)
Data quality
Coding assurance and statistical weighting.
Exploration of statistical weighting in the Graduate Outcomes Survey: technical report (2021-07-20)
Graduate Outcomes - A Summary of the Year Two SOC Coding Assurance (2021-04-29)
Graduate Outcomes SOC coding – Independent Verification Analysis Report (2021-04-29)
Quality matters: The Census and HESA Widening Participation data (2021-03-16)
Should we weight? Year one of the Graduate Outcomes survey (2020-05-21)
COVID-19
The impact of COVID-19 on higher education data.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Graduate Outcomes 2019/20 (2022-06-16)
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on student data for 2020/21 (2022-01-25)
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Graduate Outcomes 2018/19 (2021-07-20)