Yesterday I reported data from the 2014 University Experience Survey suggested that students at non-university higher education providers were, on most indicators, more satisfied with their education than students at universities.

There are also significant differences between disciplines on satisfaction with teaching quality, as seen in the chart below. I have taken out disciplines with fewer than 1,000 respondents in the UES, as well as most ‘other’ disciplinary categories as too vague. This took out both the discipline with the highest satisfaction (language and literature, 89%) and with the lowest (mechanical engineering, 72%).

Most of the relatively low-satisfaction disciplines are popular with males and international students, who report lower overall satisfaction than females and domestic students. But I can’t tell on the available data which way the causation might be running – whether students in engineering, IT and commerce faculties are less satisfied at least partly because they tend to be male and/or from overseas, or because males and international students are less satisfied because they are enrolled in engineering, IT and commerce faculties.