Students and alumni
The ‘Biographical Register of the University of St Andrews‘ has (terse) entries for all those who studied at, or were accredited by, the University of St Andrews from 1579-1897. We were able to use this data to identify students who came to St Andrews from (past, present or future) British colonies; and those alumni who later went to live or work in British colonies.
We have produced updated biographical entries for as many of these colonial students and alumni as we could, and these are currently hosted on this website. You can browse through them here: the tags in the sidebar allow you to explore particular sub-groups.
We presented a statistical overview of the colonial links of St Andrews students and alumni in Section 7 of the Legacies of Empire Report in 2025. Since then, Tomas Vancisin and Aileen Fyfe have continued to work on this dataset, and have developed a custom-built, web-based and interactive visualisation to better understand the chronological, geographical and career trends within these colonial records. Their 2026 paper (in History of Education) introduces the visualisation, reflects on the lessons learned while building it, and discusses some of the patterns and curiosities it revealed (along with a lightly revised set of statistics).
Explore the interactive visualisation!
Where did students come from?
The overwhelming majority of students at the University of St Andrews in the period 1700-1900 were from Scotland, especially central and eastern Scotland; with smaller numbers from England, and even fewer from western Europe.
We have so far identified 202 students who are recorded as ‘coming from’ places that were at some point British colonies. This is about 2% of the total student population when averaged over the two centuries, but there is clear growth from just 0.6% in the first half of the eighteenth century to 3% in the second half of the nineteenth century. There are undoubtedly more students with colonial origins yet to be found, because the ‘Biographical Register’ holds no origin information for almost 40% of students.
48 of the students with colonial origins were women: 2 of them studied for degrees (once women were admitted to the Scottish universities in 1892), while the other 46 were seeking degree-equivalent accreditation through the Lady Literate in Arts (LLA) programme (from 1877).
In the eighteenth century, most of the students with colonial origins came from the north Atlantic world (i.e. the Caribbean, and the colonies that became the USA). In the nineteenth century, most of the students with colonial origins came from British India – though there were still some from north America.
You can read more about the earliest students from the Caribbean, north America, the Indian subcontinent, Australia and New Zealand, and Africa, in section 7.3 of the Report.
You can read about the earliest known medical candidates of Indian and African heritage in this blog by Manon Williams (2025),
Where did alumni go to?
We have so far (by 2026) identified 744 students whose subsequent lives involved some time spent in one of the British colonies (broadly defined). As above, there will be more to find, as we only have ‘career’ information for about one third of all students.
In the early eighteenth century, fewer than 5% of St Andrews students are known to have gone to the colonial world – and they almost all went to north America and the Caribbean. From 1750 onwards, British India became the most popular destination for St Andrews alumni, with Australia and New Zealand also growing in popularity after 1800. Almost 20% of alumni are known to have gone to the colonies in the period 1800-1850.
The most popular occupations for St Andrews alumni in the colonies were as ministers (and other religious roles), and doctors (and other medical roles), but the pattern was different in British India than elsewhere. Read more about the occupations in section 7.4 of the Report.
