Student satisfaction tends to be higher in smaller universities

By Student Voice AI

Updated Mar 27, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we work with universities that track satisfaction closely but still need a clearer explanation of what sits behind shifts in the scores. That is why Christopher Jon Kilby, Camilla Nicoll, Jennifer Coburn, Jacinta Maree Connor, Alexa Kambouropoulos and Kathryn von Treuer's paper in Higher Education, "Student satisfaction as a function of student and staff sizes in higher education", matters. For UK institutions using NSS, PTES, PRES, and local student surveys, the paper raises a practical question: what happens to student satisfaction as universities get larger?

Context and research question

Growth is often treated as a capacity problem, with an implicit assumption that if institutions expand staffing alongside enrolment, the student experience can be protected. But students do not experience growth as a spreadsheet. They experience it through class access, support responsiveness, teaching contact, and how easy it is to navigate the institution when something goes wrong.

Kilby and colleagues examine this issue using Australian Government-led student satisfaction data from 2018 to 2021, comparing satisfaction scores with student and staff numbers across universities. They also split the analysis into pre-COVID and mid-COVID periods. Although the policy setting is Australian, the underlying question transfers well to UK higher education: when institutions scale up, do students still experience teaching quality, support, and overall educational quality in the same way?

Key findings

The paper's clearest finding is that smaller student and staff cohorts were consistently associated with stronger satisfaction scores. The association appeared across multiple domains that matter to Student Experience teams: skills development, teaching quality, student support, and overall quality of educational experience. That matters because the pressure of scale does not seem to sit in one isolated corner of university life. It shows up across the experience students are asked to evaluate.

"Smaller staff and student numbers were consistently associated with greater student satisfaction."

One useful nuance is that the study looks at absolute student and staff numbers, not just at staff-student ratios. A reasonable inference is that the issue is not simply whether an institution has hired more people, but whether growth has made the student experience harder to coordinate, personalise, or navigate. In other words, adding staff does not automatically remove the friction students feel in larger systems.

The pattern also intensified mid-COVID compared with pre-COVID. That is important because disruption tends to expose whatever is already fragile. When delivery changes quickly, students rely even more on clear communication, accessible staff, joined-up services, and visible academic support. Larger institutions may have more resources overall, but this paper suggests they can still struggle to convert scale into a consistently positive experience under pressure.

The final point is methodological. This is a correlation study, not a causal test of what specifically drives satisfaction down in larger institutions. That limitation matters, but it does not weaken the practical value of the findings. Instead, it sharpens the next question for universities: if scale is associated with lower satisfaction, what do students say is actually going wrong? That is where open-text feedback becomes essential. Survey scores can show that scale matters; comments help explain whether students are reacting to access, communication, assessment, support, timetabling, or belonging.

Practical implications

For UK higher education teams, the first implication is to treat institutional scale as a student experience risk factor, not just an operational fact. If an institution is growing, leaders should expect more pressure on the areas students most often connect with satisfaction: teaching quality, support, responsiveness, and overall organisation. Those themes should be monitored deliberately in NSS, PTES, module evaluations, and pulse surveys.

Second, universities should avoid assuming that more staffing on paper is the same as better support in practice. The paper does not argue against growth, and it does not show that larger institutions cannot deliver excellent experiences. What it does suggest is that scale creates coordination challenges that need deliberate design. Students need visible contact routes, predictable support, manageable class structures, and clearer communication about where help sits.

Third, this is exactly the kind of problem where comment analysis adds value beyond headline satisfaction metrics. A falling score can tell you there is strain in the system, but it cannot tell you whether students mean slow replies, limited staff access, weak community, administrative complexity, or poor feedback loops. Student Voice Analytics fits naturally here because analysing free-text comments at scale makes it easier to separate those issues, compare them across schools and cohorts, and identify where scale is becoming a student experience problem rather than just a growth statistic.

Finally, the paper is a reminder that benchmarking should not stop at institutional averages. If larger universities tend to show lower satisfaction, then UK teams should segment results much more carefully by school, level, mode, and student group. Growth rarely lands evenly. The most useful response is to find where scale feels heaviest to students and act there first.

FAQ

Q: How should a growing UK university apply this finding in practice?

A: Start by breaking satisfaction data into the components students actually experience, such as teaching quality, support, organisation, and sense of connection. Then compare those patterns with local open comments, student-representative feedback, and operational data such as response times or class sizes. The goal is to identify where scale is producing friction, rather than assuming the whole institution has the same problem.

Q: Does this study prove that large universities provide a worse student experience?

A: No. The paper identifies associations between satisfaction scores and absolute student and staff numbers across Australian universities from 2018 to 2021. It does not prove direct causation, and it does not test every institutional mechanism behind the pattern. The transferable lesson is more practical: growth can create experience risks that universities need to investigate rather than explain away.

Q: What does this change about how universities should use student voice data?

A: It suggests that overall satisfaction scores should be treated as an early warning, not a full diagnosis. If scale is associated with weaker satisfaction, universities need richer evidence to understand why. That means combining survey results with free-text comments, representative feedback, and local context so the student voice explains what scale feels like in real terms.

References

[Paper Source]: Christopher Jon Kilby, Camilla Nicoll, Jennifer Coburn, Jacinta Maree Connor, Alexa Kambouropoulos, Kathryn von Treuer "Student satisfaction as a function of student and staff sizes in higher education" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01569-y

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