PG Insight at Scale: Highlights from the 2025 State of Student Recruitment

We love PG at FAU (really, we do). We care deeply about our audiences and we see our insight as a way to represent and advocate for them: helping marketing and recruitment professionals (like you!) understand, appreciate and meet the needs of prospective Masters and PhD students. We honestly don't know anyone else, anywhere, who does more of this work, more often.

It feels like there's a 'but' coming, doesn't it? Actually, it's an 'and'.

...and these days we do even more of this work as part of our wider Keystone Education Group family. I've wanted to share some of that wider insight here for a while and the launch of the State of Student Recruitment 2025 report feels like a pretty sensible time.

Did somebody just say 'undergraduate'?

The 'SSR' is powered by the same data sources that we draw on for FAU's Pulse reports: the combination of search and survey data that defines Keystone's approach to insight.

But whereas Pulse provides in-cycle insight across select variables (entry points, destination shifts, etc), the SSR draws on a much bigger dataset to describe the current 'state' of, well, student recruitment.

This year's report analyses responses from over 40,000 prospective students, representing a much broader range of audiences than I usually talk about here. For one thing, whilst the UK is the most popular destination in the sample (and that's an insight in itself) it only represents about 20%. For another, this data allows me to compare responses from prospective Masters, PhD and... Bachelors students. That's not possible when your audience research is built on websites called 'FindAMasters' and 'FindAPhD', but it makes for an interesting comparison when you can do it And now we can.

I'm going to pick out a few highlights from this year's SSR below and explain why I think they're interesting. But you can already access the full report for yourself (including explorable dashboards). There's more to come to, with dedicated analysis of specific audiences (including postgraduates) but let's take a look at some headlines...

Every year we ask prospective students how they prefer to communicate with a university. And every year email is the top result. But its popularity has dropped by 10 percentage points, from 70% in 2024 to 60% in 2025. And there's something interesting happening when we look more closely at the data:

This data is for prospective international students (domestic responses are broadly comparable). Some of what we're seeing is expected – and the differences between UG and PG are fairly stark. Email is most dominant at PhD level (I'm pretty sure nobody sends a research proposal over WhatsApp) whereas instant messaging is very popular with undergraduate (typically younger) audiences.

I think there's a broader story here about audiences seeking more direct and authentic communications. Email may be losing ground, but it's still the majority preference as a traditional and trusted channel. Instant messaging and video conferencing are relatively distant second and third choices but both have increased in popularity and both (especially video) are immediate means of contacting an individual human. Live webchat was also an option, by the way, but it came bottom for all audiences. There's something in this, I think – and something to think about when thinking about how much and where to automate student communications.

Staying with communication channels, the SSR also asks which social media is most influential in the prospective student journey.

Here's how that looks, again broken down by level for prospective international audiences:

I expect one part of this chart will immediately catch the attention of PG professionals: if you're recruiting PhD students, you really do need to be active on LinkedIn (and it's worth thinking about what that means in terms of institutional accounts vs those of individual academics, research groups, etc). But if you're coming to PG from a UG background (or working in a role that covers both) you might be surprised just how clear the differences are. Channels like Instagram and TikTok are genuinely influential with prospective undergraduates, but significantly less so when you're trying to engage at Masters and PhD level.

This isn't to say you should abandon TikTok content for prospective postgrads. We've had great success and quite a bit of fun engaging audiences this way. But if you want to move beyond awareness and really communicate the value of your institution, you probably need to be on LinkedIn. We've had great success there too.

The size and scope of the SSR means it can approach topics from several different directions, with interesting stories coming through across questions. Employability is a great example of that.

First of all, we see that it really matters in program selection:

Unsurprisingly, affordability is the most important factor for all audiences (that slight drop-off for PhD probably reflects the nature of doctoral funding, with fees automatically covered in some cases).

It's more interesting to see that employment ranks so highly. Indeed, employability outranks rankings at Bachelors and Masters levels. The 'state of student recruitment' right now really is one in which audiences care a lot about the opportunities to develop professionally alongside their studies – and what that enables them to do after.

There's potentially a broader economic context for this too, with a rise in interest in flexible study alongside around half of international and domestic audiences saying they expect to supplement their funding with in-study work. Employment and study are increasingly intertwined in a way we really need to bear in mind when thinking about prospective student needs and designing programs that meet them.

There's more to say about all of this (and more data to say more about) but I'll let you explore for yourself. Personally, I'm fascinated by the ability to compare UG and PG with this breadth and depth and looking forward to working on some of the more specific reports. Watch this space.

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