Number of UG courses are down...but what about PG?

Last week, we saw stories suggesting a large fall in the number of undergraduate courses available to new students.

It's a pretty substantial drop, although we must stress the figures are disputed and it's difficult, thanks to the UK's laudably flexible system to get a very accurate figure with all the options of combined studies and so on, that are available.

But what of postgraduate study? Well, Graduate Prospects, of course, runs the National Postgraduate Database of PG course and study options, so we're in a position to have a stab at examining how things have changed. We're still working on getting really accurate figures, but we think that between 2006/7 and 2011/12, the number of PG courses available has gone up appreciably, with almost the whole rise in business and finance ( the number of courses available in the arts and in STEM seems to have held relatively steady).

In a way, this is unsurprising - we predicted a rise in PG enrolments as downturn became recession, and we were right about that, so with more students, you might expect more diversity. But it's still interesting, and begs a number of questions about whether this will be sustained, what this means for students and how this feeds into the ongoing and very timely debate on postgraduate provision.