Student satisfaction tends to be higher in smaller universities

By Student Voice AI

Updated Apr 10, 2026

Growth can make a university harder to navigate long before it shows up clearly in the score line. 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, it raises a practical question: as universities get larger, where does satisfaction come under pressure, and what kind of evidence explains the gap?

Context and research question

Growth is often framed as a capacity problem: if staffing rises alongside enrolment, the student experience should hold up. But students do not experience growth as a spreadsheet. They feel it through access to classes, 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 and splitting 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 populations were consistently associated with stronger satisfaction scores. The pattern appeared across domains that matter directly to Student Experience teams: skills development, teaching quality, student support, and overall quality of educational experience. For UK institutions, that points to a broad experience risk, not one isolated operational issue.

"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 staff-student ratios. That suggests 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 practice, adding staff does not automatically remove the friction students feel in larger systems.

The pattern also intensified mid-COVID compared with pre-COVID. That matters 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 turn 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 reduce the paper's practical value. 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 a defensible open-text analysis methodology becomes essential. Survey scores can show that scale may matter; 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. That is the practical core of institutional improvement through student voice: spotting strain early rather than explaining it away after the scores land.

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. It does suggest 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. The benefit is not just better service; it is a university that still feels navigable as it grows.

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 helps 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, UK teams should segment results more carefully by school, level, mode, and student group. Growth rarely lands evenly. The fastest route to action is to find where scale feels heaviest to students and respond there first.

If you want to see where scale is affecting the student experience in your own institution, explore Student Voice Analytics. It helps teams analyse free-text comments across schools, levels, and cohorts with one reproducible method, so they can pinpoint whether support, communication, workload, or belonging issues are driving satisfaction gaps.

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. That helps teams 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, because headline satisfaction scores can miss dissatisfaction risks. 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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