Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey 2025

Advance HE’s Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is a key tool for the UK higher education sector to understand the current experiences of postgraduate taught (PGT) students. The survey has been running for 16 years. It offers PGT students a chance to provide feedback to their institutions, while institutions gain important insight into their students’ experiences, including comparisons with the wider sector and a wide selection of other benchmark groups within the sector.

Key findings from the 2025 survey include:

• 86% of postgraduate taught (PGT) students were satisfied with the quality of their course. This is the highest level of overall satisfaction recorded since PTES began in 2014 and is up from 84% in 2024.
• Fewer students this year report that cost-of-living issues are affecting their studies “a lot” but over 60% still say these issues have had at least a little negative impact.
• The proportion of students who have considered leaving remains unchanged from 2024, at 16%. Balancing studies with other commitments is now consistently the most common main reason why students have considered leaving.

Download the report below.