International Student Satisfaction in Europe 2016

At Studyportals we care about helping students and making their lives a little bit easier. One way of doing this is by providing as much information about study choice and universities as we possibly can. Since 2013, we have our own platform SteXX.eu where (international) students can leave a review of their experiences of studying at a certain university. Within 4 years, over 170,000 students wrote a review already!

As we realize how valuable these reviews are, we have created the International Student Satisfaction Awards in order to recognize those universities with the happiest international students.

The fourth edition of the Student Satisfaction Awards are based on 15,965 reviews written by students. In the reviews, students can rate their experience out of 10, by assessing to which extent they would recommend this experience to their friends. In addition, students can give a small description of the score they have given.

This year, 153 awards were given to those universities that received at least 20 reviews with a minimum average score of 8 out of 10.

As we don’t think ranking universities is the best way to recognize every university’s efforts, we created three award categories to distinguish between levels of satisfaction:

Award for Very Good International Student Satisfaction: at least 8.0 out of 10
Award for Excellent International Student Satisfaction: between 9.0 and 9.4 out of 10
Award for Outstanding International Student Satisfaction: at least 9.5 out of 10

Moreover, this year international students are very satisfied with their international experiences, scoring it 8.8 out of 10 on average, which is slightly higher compared to 2015 where students scored their experience an 8.6 out of 10. Similar to last year, only 7.3% of all students that left a review scored their experience a 6 or lower.

Figure 1: International Student Satisfaction: Winning Countries

This year’s best performing country is Norway with an average score of 9.3 out of 10, together with last year’s winner Ireland and Poland.

Where Norway, Ireland and Poland scored the highest grades respectively, Spain has the highest number of awarded universities (27) followed by Germany (15), Italy and Finland (11).

Figure 3: Division of Award Categories

In total, 14 universities have received an Outstanding International Student Satisfaction award:

University College Cork, Ireland.
Wrocław University of Technology, Poland.
University of Heidelberg – Germany.
University of Bamberg – Germany.
University of Oslo – Norway.
Masaryk University – Czech Republic.
University of Tartu – Estonia.
Lund University – Sweden.
Technical University of Denmark (DTU) – Denmark.
University of Tampere – Finland.
AGH University of Science & Technology – Poland.
University of Murcia – Spain.
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick – Ireland.
University of Iceland – Iceland.

These universities received their awards during the International Student Satisfaction Awards at the EAIE 2016 in Liverpool.

Figure 2. International Student Satisfaction: Most Satisfied Students

French, Italian, Greek and Spanish students gave the highest overall scores to their experiences abroad and are therefore this years’ most satisfied students. Similar to last year, students from Finland and The Netherlands are least satisfied with their experiences abroad. A possible explanation for this is that they are used to a higher standard of education and therefore had higher expectations when studying abroad. However, with an average of 8.24 as lowest, they are still very pleased with their experiences abroad!