Universities Scotland Director, Claire McPherson, takes the positives and some policy lessons from the 2025 National Student Survey results, as published on 9 July.
The National Student Survey results for 2025 are out and the top line is that our students are happy with their experience of higher education in Scotland.
In the 2025 survey, 80.7% say that they are satisfied with the overall quality of their course. The survey results offer a very welcome bit of positivity to coincide with graduations, after what has undeniably been a tough few months for Scotland’s universities.
Beneath the headline figures there’s a lot to take from the data as relevant to some of the broader and deeper policy issues that Scotland’s universities and Scotland as a whole is wrestling with. But first, let’s take a moment to enjoy the good news:
- Over 92% of students in Scotland say that staff are good at explaining things. Full credit to staff as it is this metric that Scotland, as a whole, scores most highly on.
- Over 87% of students in Scotland said that their course regularly challenges them to achieve their best work.
- 87% of students in Scotland say the course is intellectually stimulating.
- 83% said that it develops skills and knowledge that they will need for their future.
Reading into the results, and connecting them to Scotland’s policy and funding landscape, we have three main takeaways:
1. Satisfaction comes in all shapes and sizes
In Scotland, the institutions coming in the top 5 for overall undergraduate satisfaction perfectly reflect the sector’s diversity and makes the point that quality comes in different packages. The University of St Andrews and the Open University in Scotland come in top, sharing a satisfaction score of 90%*. Also in the top five are Strathclyde, Aberdeen, and the University of the Highlands and Islands, all scoring 86% or above.
This really shouldn’t need saying but it does, so I will: Scotland’s ancient, chartered, and modern institutions all deliver high quality education for students. It’s possible to achieve this outcome for learners within a traditional, broad-based, brick institution that’s been around for hundreds of years, it’s possible to do so within a modern university, and it’s possible to do so within a highly dispersed, tertiary model as with UHI or in a distance-learning institution like the Open University.
The diversity of Scotland’s higher education sector needs to be better understood and championed as we look ahead to what is certain to be a challenging future. The data tells us that Scotland’s students are the beneficiaries of that diversity.
*The OU in Scotland shared its disaggregated data with Universities Scotland.
2. Strong on skills
Students favourably rate their degrees for what it helps them do in terms of skills development.
Two questions in the NSS specifically ask students about their skills development whilst at university.
- 85% of students said that their degree helps build their skills; and,
- 83% said that it develops skills and knowledge that they will need for their future.
Two years on from Withers, Scotland is still stuck in a binary view of academic and vocational education despite James Wither’s very clear warning that this “false dichotomy between university education and vocational learning is inherently problematic”.
Our students get it. Policy makers need to be next.
When people say “skills” they still aren’t thinking of universities or university degrees often enough. They think of colleges and training providers and, of course, they play an important role. But so do universities. Degrees can be professionally accredited, can be delivered with huge components of work-based learning akin to an apprenticeship (though not going by that name) and benefit from input and engagement from employers in multiple ways from design, delivery and assessment. The learning experience in a university equips students with the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed professionally.
As we go into an election year, Scotland would benefit massively if it could make a conceptual shift on skills. In order to get Scotland’s future skills needs right, universities need to be a core part of the planning.
3. Success doesn’t necessarily mean financial sustainability
Sitting just outside the top five ranking Scottish institutions for student satisfaction is the University of Dundee. It scores 83% for overall student satisfaction in the 2025 NSS; higher than the Scottish average of 80.5%. Dundee’s scores reach and exceed 90% on multiple NSS questions. The teaching and student experience staff at Dundee should be immensely proud of what they deliver.
That result might surprise many people given the well documented difficulties that Dundee faces. But Dundee is hugely successful on multiple fronts; teaching, research and innovation, as measured externally and objectively. One lesson to take away is that institutional success on any number of metrics should not be mistaken for financial sustainability.
Universities Scotland has been warning that the levels of public investment into teaching and research are unsustainable for years. This hasn’t cut through, probably in part because almost all of the outward-facing signs from the sector are positive. This year’s NSS results being a great case in point. There has been a distinct lack of “bloody stumps” as is the term used in parliament. Until that changed.
It’s pretty hard to make sense of such a strong show on student satisfaction in the same academic year in which close to half of institutions have been forced to start voluntary redundancy schemes and a survey from Universities UK on cost mitigation measures revealed institutions are now forced to make all manner of necessary cutbacks including reducing study modules and course consolidation.
Universities will work incredibly hard to keep delivering strong outcomes for students, employers and funders, in ever-challenging circumstances, because it is the basis on which everything else depends. Cross-subsidy has been core to keeping this going for many years. That is now a far riskier strategy.
Continued success should not be mistaken by policy makers for all being well under the hood. Scotland’s universities need a sustainable funding solution that enables them to keep delivering high quality outcomes for the long term.