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Student Grant Recipients: A Collaborative Data Analysis
Introduction
The HEA plays a leading role in constructive and fruitful collaborations across the higher education sector and with other national stakeholders. These collaborations enable us to generate insights from across the higher education system to expand and strengthen the evidence base for policy development and interventions. The HEA already shares data with the Central Statistics Office, Department of Education, Quality and Qualifications Ireland and SOLAS. The reports that follow are the consequence of a Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) that is in place with Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI), the national grant awarding authority. This data enables us to compare the demographics, progression, and outcomes of grant recipients, and compare these with non-recipients, so we can better assist and support in policy-making across the third level system. We would like to extend our gratitude to colleagues in SUSI for their input and expertise.
SUSI provides support to eligible students in approved, full-time courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The SUSI website sets out the types of grants that can be awarded. These fall into two broad categories: maintenance grants, which help students with their living costs; and fee grants, which pay tuition fees and the student contribution. The financial amount of grant to be awarded is dependent on family income and how many dependent children the student has. A number of grant awards can be differentiated according to adjacency, which relates to the distance that a student lives from college. If a student lives less than 30km from college, they receive the adjacent rate; otherwise they receive the non-adjacent rate. The Methodology and Definitions section of this suite of reports gives more detail on the different grant types and financial amounts awarded.
Through the DSA, SUSI has transferred data to the HEA which provides data from 2017/2018 to 2022/23 grant recipients. The data transferred includes students’ grant rates, adjacency rates and distance from college. The intention of the data sharing arrangement is to analyse the student life-cycle, from entry to post-graduation outcomes, from the lens of grant status. Therefore there are four separate analyses reported on here:
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- Equity of Access Statistics
- Student Demographic Statistics
- Non-progression Analysis
- Graduate Outcomes Statistics
The first two reports (equity of access and student demographics) consider the grant status of the student body by personal characteristics (such as age, gender, disability, ethnicity) and course characteristics (HEI attended and field of study). The third report (non-progression) considers non-progression, which measures the extent to which students drop out of their institution between first and second year. Finally, the fourth report (Graduate Outcomes) considers outcomes for graduates nine months after graduation according to grant status, and includes employment and further study outcomes.
Analytical Note
There are a number of methodological and analytical issues that should be taken into account by the reader.
Firstly, it should be noted that the datasets in this analysis do not encompass the full cohort of students in receipt of a SUSI grant. Other SUSI grant holders, such as those in further education, those in non-HEA-funded institutions and those studying abroad are not included in the analysis. This analysis is restricted to those studying higher education in HEA-funded institutions.
Secondly, each of these reports is distinct and different in approach to data linking, analytical approach, and presentation, and this is due to two main reasons:
- Each report involves a different base dataset. Therefore, different analytical choices have been made in each of the four reports to reflect the structure and nature of those datasets. For example, in some of the reports (e.g. 2. Student Demographic Statistics), five years of SUSI data is considered. In other reports (for example, 4. Graduate Outcomes Statistics), only one year of graduate outcomes data is considered. As another example, in some reports, due to statistical disclosure controls, certain types of students or programme may be excluded from the analysis in order to protect individuals’ data. Therefore the reader should not assume that each report is considering the same cohort of students as a form of longitudinal analysis.
- Each report has a different analytical purpose, and the purpose of each report is set out in the text. In some instances, the purpose is to directly compare the SUSI grant recipient cohort with non-grant recipients. In other instances, we are more interested in assessing the overall size of the SUSI population within the HEA higher education system. That also leads to diverging analytical choices when it comes to the dataset at hand.
The reader should therefore bear in mind that these four reports are stand alone from an analytical perspective. At the same time, by presenting them together, the aim is to support the higher education institutions and policy makers by giving as full a picture of student grant recipients as possible using all available HEA data.
Each report, along with a Methodology and Definitions page, can be accessed by clicking the relevant button on the right hand side of the page.