Outputs
Interactive Maps of UK TNE in East Asia
Authors: Que Anh Dang and Jie Ma
These interactive maps visualise the numbers and trends of students enrolled on UK Transnational Education (TNE) programmes in 15 East Asian countries and territories from the academic year 2010/2011 to 2020/2021. The data was sourced from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) in June 2022.
The 15 East Asian countries and territories refer to 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and 5 Northeast Asian countries or territories, namely China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), Japan, and South Korea.
The horizontal menu bar below allows you to browse different sets of data showing the number of UK TNE students and UK-based students by region, country, and level of study. The interactive maps aim at providing reliable and useful data for decision-making processes at national, institutional and individual levels in the UK and East Asia.
The TNE numbers include only students who study for awards or courses of UK universities, but study overseas without coming to the UK. Students who commence their studies outside the UK and subsequently come to continue their studies within the UK are included in the TNE record up until the point at which they enter the UK.
Notable changes to the HESA data record from 2019/20 mean this TNE data should be interpreted with caution. Firstly, before 2018/19, the Aggregate offshore record included all publicly funded HE providers in the UK and the University of Buckingham. From 2019/20, the coverage expanded to include all English providers registered with the Office for Students’ (OfS) in the Approved (fee cap) and Approved categories and all publicly funded HE providers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Secondly, Oxford Brookes University was historically the outlier in TNE, accounting for almost half of all TNE students every year since 2008–09. This anomaly was due to one single programme, a BSc in Applied Accountancy where Oxford Brookes University is involved in the quality assurance of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) examinations. In 2019–20 Oxford Brookes changed reporting practice to reflect the point at which students engage directly with their particular component of the programme, and this has brought a decrease of over 250,000 students to total TNE numbers. This led to a significant drop to the overall number of student enrolments based wholly outside the UK. For example, in 2018/19, they accounted for 39% of the population whereas in 2019/20 this reduced to 1% of the TNE student population following the change*.
We welcome your feedback and helpful suggestions to improve the interactive maps. Please write to us at peer@coventry.ac.ukNote: For a global landscape of UK TNE beyond the East Asian region, you can visit UUKI website.
*Source: HESA 2022