Statistics and Globalisation
Initially I want my website to be focused just for students studying fashion in Britain. However there is a large number of foreign students that come from abroad to study in Britain. So in terms of my marketing report and how my concept could embrace the world market, I need to look at how many foreign students study in Britain, and how I can target these customers to my advantage. I thought the best way to start this was by finding out about how many foreign students study in Britain, and where in the world most of these students come from. I then need to consider how I can target these customers. When searching the internet for university student statistics. I came across the website Higher Education Statistics Agency. This site has statistics from the recent years for use by the government and acts as the official statistics.
Firstly I wanted to use the website to find out how many students in Britain came from outside the UK to study. From the 17.4% that were from other countries the pie chart below shows that the majority of the foreign students were from Asia and the rest of the EU.
Although a large proportion of students studying in the UK were domiciled in the UK before they entered Higher Education (82.6%), a further 5.3% were from other countries within the European Union (EU) and 12.1% were from countries outside the EU.
This next graph below shows whether there has been a fall or an increase within these countries whose students have come to Britain to study. Again Asia is strong with a clear increase in students coming over from there. This again shows how important these students are.
This next graph illustrates how many of all the students studying in the UK (both British and foreign) are studying what subjects. I am interested in the bars for creative arts & design, as this is where fashion would come under. As you can see in terms of degree level (first degree/ the yellow bar) the creative arts & design subject is one of the most popular. This yellow bar is one of the longest, I am estimating around 146,000 students it shows are studying within this category. This shows how popular and important this subject area is. Hopefully, my site will therefore have a large target audience.
With quite a high percentage of foreign students, I may want to invest in making the site easily accessible in different languages if it becomes popular in the future, or even making websites for each of the countries. Additionally, a lot of foreign students have to have the money to come over and study in the UK. I could use this to my advantage by adding an optional VIP subscription which offers more access to things for a small fee per year or month, as well as the free subscription.
Although these graphs and information are extremely useful to my secondary research, I have found it extremely hard to find any sites or statistics on those studying fashion in particular. However I have found another website university.which.co.uk/ http://university.which.co.uk/This website allows you to find out quick and easy facts and statistics about different Universities. I started with looking up The London College of Fashion, due to its location in Britain’s capital, its high reputation and it’s dedication to those studying fashion. Interestingly the page read 39% of the students who are study come from outside of the UK. This is an extremely high percentage, this making it even more evident that my site needs to be easy to access and navigate, and maybe even expand to other languages, as well as being friendly to all beliefs and tastes.
