The popular Channel 4 sitcom Fresh Meat might have aired its final series almost a decade ago but it still immortalises much of what is regarded as the “typical UK student experience” – six young people who initially barely know each other sharing a house, partying hard and only very rarely feeling the need to do any paid work.
The Student Academic Experience Survey suggests that this was true for many at the time. In 2015, 42 per cent of UK students lived in a flat or house with others, and 35 per cent had paid employment. But since then we have had a pandemic and a cost of living crisis, with which student maintenance grants and loans have not kept up, often failing to meet even accommodation expenses, never mind .
Today, twice as many (68 per cent) UK students have a job and half as many (21 per cent) live in a house with friends, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) and Advance HE’ss. The use of university halls (27 per cent) ismostly unchanged but the proportion of students living at home with their family has jumped from 23 per cent to 37 per cent.
A survey published by Hepi last week, meanwhile, puts the proportion of students whowork to cover their basic living costs at 66 per cent, working an average of 17 hours a week mostlyin low-paid and flexible sectors, such as health and social care, retail and hospitality.
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What Hepi director Nick Hillman calls the “boarding school model” of UK higher education, then, could be starting to unravel of its own accord. But as both students and universities suffer financial hardship, should the sector take a more conscious step away from a high-cost model of higher education that most other countries have not felt the need to replicate on anything like the same scale?
The boarding school model has its origins in the Oxbridge college model, of course. But that model proved very durable in the UK even as universities began to spring up in every city and even many towns, lessening the inherent need for students to move far from home for higher education. For instance, when the campus-based, plate-glass universities were established in the 1960s, student accommodation was very much part of the package.
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Even today, that commuting students still see themselves as outliers compared with their residential peers, even though that almost half of students classify themselves as commuters. Accurate national data on commuter statistics are hard to come by but Martin Blakey, former chief executive of the student housing charity Unipol, said that a “rapid change” is probably taking place amid the cost-of-living crisis.
If it is, that would bring the UK closer into line with many other European countries, where commuting from home to a local university is often the norm. Across the European Union, just 28 per cent of students live in university accommodation or in a shared house, while a third live with their parents. Even in the US, although expensive, residence-based liberal arts colleges abound, a last year found that, across the nation as a whole, 42 per cent of students live in the family home.
In England, the past decade has been bookended by Westminster’s scrapping and forthcoming partial reintroduction of maintenance grants. In the interim, recent analyses found that the average student rent rose above the maximum maintenance loan in London. First-year students who live in halls in England now spend £632 per month on rent alone.
Rising costs have consequences for the residential housing model. Despite record domestic undergraduate intakes, two major student housing companies recently said because of a drop in demand from both domestic and international students –especiallythose from China.
“This has been an incredibly difficult year for people filling beds in student accommodation,” said Blakey. “You can’t have more students entering the system and fewer students needing accommodation without coming to the conclusion that the residential model is declining.”
Liz Thomas, professor of higher education at the University of York, said students value the opportunity to move away from home but many struggle to combine work and study – particularly if, despite relocating, they still have significant travel distances to their universities.
“We have a model of higher education which is based on students from the 20th century so, really, it is not very fit for the 21st century, when students’ finances in particular are in a very different state,” she said. “With the majority of students having to take on employment to fund their studies, and students choosing to live at home or being forced to live at home…the higher education delivery model and the wider student experience is very much not set up for them.”
Take university timetables, which often still start early and finish late and leave long gaps between required classes, forcing students to be out of the house for long periods of time and to spend more money.
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“I guess that reinforces a sense of not really being validated or valued within the higher education system,” said Thomas. “Timetabling is the massive issue but that’s coupled with an attendance policy that’s really been designed for international students and meeting visa requirements” – which restrict the ability to do paid work and require in-person attendance of classes.
On top of financial pressures, students’ attitudes have changed. According to the , more than a quarter of students do not drink alcohol – up from 15 per cent in 2021-22. The proportion of respondents who intentionally get drunk more than once a week halved over this period, and drug use has also fallen.
Such figures back up Thomas’sensethat young people are no longer going to university in search of a “wild student experience” and are a lot more pragmatic: their “primary reason for going into higher education is to get a degree and to get a good job”.
Danielle Sanderson, associate professor of real estate at UCL, has a similar view, noting that simply getting a bachelor’s degree is no longer the near guarantee of a good job that it once was.
“I am sure that a few students do party a lot and get insufficient sleep and rely on AI to scrape through their assignments,” she said. “But in my experience at UCL, the majority are working very hard, both in their paid employment and their studies. This leaves little time for having a few fun years.”
That fun vacuum also extends to the extracurricular activities that are regarded as essential for developing the soft skills employers want. Even students who save on accommodation costs by living with their families tend to leave campus straight after class, rather than waiting around for social and society events, Sanderson added.
For their part, cash-strapped universities might welcome the diminution of student demand for extracurricular opportunities – even if the cost of building accommodation is nowmostly borne by the private, purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) sector.
In the US, the provision of such infamous luxuries as lazy rivers has been blamed for pushing up tuition costs to unsustainable levels, precipitating a student debt crisis. In the UK, where domestic fees cannot be raised above statutory limits, such extravagances have been less in evidence, but the competitive pressure to offer students ever more for their money has been just as keenly felt – as attested to by the doubling of jobs associated with the “student experience” between 2005 and 2017.
And in some ways, student expectations are still increasing – particularly in the area of welfare services. The well-documented rise in mental ill health, for instance, has obliged universities to ramp up spending on counselling services as the NHS has struggled to meet demand. And students very much think that they should: the Hepi survey showed that just 4 per cent feel mental health support should be provided by the NHS only. As a result, UK universities’ expenditure on mental health support has grown by an .
Meanwhile, increased regulation in other areas, such as protecting free speech and preventing harassment and sexual misconduct, is also pushing up costs – as are expectations to contribute more to their local areas, according to Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK. Most of these activities are not funded, and so the costs must come from general teaching income, she added.
“My feeling is that we are now regulating for a system we can no longer really afford. With increasing financial pressure, I can see that universities are going to need to think about how they prioritise. Teaching and the quality of the learning opportunities have to be paramount,” she said.
If the sector is “creaking under a lack of funding” then universities need to cast off some of their more extraneous activities, agreed Robert Dingwall, emeritus professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University, so that they don’t damage their “core business” of research and teaching.
“They’ve acquired these extensive health and welfare dimensions,” he said. But “university lecturers are not in the business of suicide prevention: that’s the job of the NHS. It’s not the job of the university to be a kind of proxy parent for the students.”
It would be difficult for universities themselves to advocate for a reduced role, he conceded. But the Office for Students should be “taking the lead” on their behalf.
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To some extent, the accretion of welfare demands goes hand in hand with the boarding school model of higher education. When students spend most of their lives on or near campus, it seems only natural that a university would take some responsibility for their welfare, as a real boarding school would.
Such provision isfar less extensive in mainland Europe, where university students are particularly likely to remain in the family home. That is especially true in southern Europe, according to ; a new law in Spain requires new universities to build accommodation for just 10 per cent of their student bodies, for instance.
The financial benefits of living at home are obvious in terms of reduced housing and food costs. The average rent for student accommodation is just over €300 (£265) a month across the bloc and even with home living more common, a quarter of European students spend 40 per cent or more of their total monthly income on accommodation.
However, students who live at home “really miss out on the student experience because living in student accommodation is quite supportive of socio-academic integration, and it may really reduce dropout among students,” said Christoph Gwosć, a researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies. “If students can’t pay for that…it’s a shame.”
No doubt part of the reason residence is less centralto the European student experience is that its university sectors are less hierarchical, reducing the need forstudents to move away to attend the “best” university possible. that research capacity is much more evenly distributed in Europe than it is in the UK and the US, making research-based education much more accessible. And Gwosć said the difference in quality between the best and worst institutions is much larger in the anglophone world than it is in Germany, where universities of applied sciences have a wide regional spread. “That means when students in Germany cannot get access to the best universities because they are rather immobile, there are still decent alternatives in or close to their hometown,” he said.
It has also traditionally been the case that European universities have fewer international students than their UK counterparts. But European universities’ student bodies are more international in the coming years as several countries actively seek to expand their intakes – which could be why British PBSA firms are increasingly interested in expansion into the European Union.
“If you wonder what’s happened to all these PBSA providers, they’re all working,” said Unipol’s Blakey. “They’re building stuff in Europe. If anything, Europe’s moving to [the residential model] we’re moving from.”
Sara Özogul, assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Groningen, noted that student housing company Greystar is marketing its properties in the Netherlands as a type of deluxe UK-style student experience. “In this way, one could maybe say that the ‘UK experience’ is being exported, including the associated lifestyle marketing,” she added.
She said the rise of PBSA also “reflects a shrinking state, which offloads responsibilities” for things such as student accommodation. But “the problem with PBSA…is that rents are often unaffordable for many students, even though it is designated as student housing,” she said. “In my view, it should be in the state’s interest to ensure an adequate, affordable supply of student housing.”
The Netherlands does have a relatively well-developed social housing system, she conceded, and students can often qualify for rent support; a large non-profit housing association provides more than 33,000 student rooms in several cities, for instance. Yet the country still faces a major shortage of housing, including of student housing, with universities often telling international students to stay away if they can’t find housing.
One significant difference between many EU universities and their UK counterparts is that the former are much more flexible on how long students can take to finish their degrees. When EU students combine studying with working, “it leads to longer completion times”, said York’s Thomas, who is also a higher education researcher and consultant. The UK doesn’t have “a flexible model that allows that to happen”, so the need to work is “just piling the pressure on students. They either experience poor mental health or they have lower academic outcomes, or they potentially drop out and lose out on all the benefits of higher education.”
Hence, she believes, universities maight need to try meeting students where they are – by offering more flexible study arrangements over a longer time frame.
Meanwhile, UCL’s Sanderson suggests that the cost of studying – and therefore the pressure to undertake paid work – could be reduced by establishing teaching-only universities that hold classes throughout the year. “Currently, teaching really only takes place during two terms of around 11 weeks,” she said. Year-round teaching “would enable students to cover the same taught material in two years.”
Indeed, this could be the direction of travel for England. The recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper envisages a more stratified university sector, with some institutions focusing on teaching in specialist areas. However, Steph Harris, Universities UK’s director of policy, notes “real tension” between that aspiration and the White Paper’s pledge to “deal with cold spots in higher education provision”, concerns about which are grounded in the conviction that students should be able to study their subject of choice in their local area – not least so that the cost of studying can be kept down. The government should avoid a situation where greater subject choice is available to students who have the ability to travel, Harris said.
Another risk of a stratified system is that it could be seen as two-tier. Sanderson noted that although students who have to work part-time struggle to find the time for extracurricular activities and a social life, her two-year university idea would leave even less time for such things. And she conceded that if three-year degrees continued to be offered alongside the two-year option, the latter might be seen as inferior, as polytechnics used to be.
Unipol’s Blakey, who has worked in student housing policy for more than 30 years, has the same fear. It is about time the sector had a rethink about its delivery model, he said, but he suspected the future could simply be a repeat of the past.
“We may end up…back where we started…with a set of elite universities, the Russell Group, whose model will be mainly residential, and then we’ll have the old polytechnics moving back to the model they were founded on,” focused on teaching mainly local students.
“The challenge for policy,” he said, “is if you’re going to have a more localised university, how do you avoid having a very significant two-tier university system?”
Hepi’s Hillman, meanwhile, is far from convinced that a revolution in the UK delivery model is either in process or in students’ interests. Referring back to articles he about a decade ago, he said: “When I sought to popularise the phrase ‘boarding school model’ to describe the UK’s standard model of full-time HE, a lot of people automatically assumed I was being rude about [it],” he said. “Far from it. I was really seeking to emphasise the benefits that come from an all-round education, one that extends far beyond the lecture hall into extracurricular activities and a full-on social life. As [former universities minister] David Willetts used to say, the residential experience provides a relatively safe and secure route to adulthood, too.”
He acknowledged the financial strain, noting that boarding schools’ ability to raise their fees at will has seen their average fees rise to £60,000 a year: roughly double the cost of tuition and living expenses for an English university. Hence, universities’ ability to offer a similar service to boarding schools in terms of personal attention, for instance, is diminishing – just as students’ ability to make the most of their student experience is diminishingbecause of their need to work.
“In these circumstances, some of the attractions of a traditional residential university experience do tend to break down, especially for those from poorer backgrounds,” Hillman conceded. “But we should also remember that when, in the depths of Covid, people wrote off the residential model as a waste of money, most residential students actually sought to stay in their student accommodation and, post-Covid, demand for traditional HE went up. If there’s one thing lockdown proved, it’s that 18- or 19-year-olds are – and their parents are often keen for that to happen too.”
Hence, his “best guess is that we might have somewhat more commuter students numerically and perhaps even as a proportion of the home-student total in the near future. But I think this shift will be at the margins rather than overall.”
And that, he thinks, is a good thing.
“I’d even go so far as to say that an all-round education is one of the UK's great gifts to the world and it would be idiotic to give it up. After all, people don’t just go to university to get a degree; they go to find themselves, to explore life beyond their hometown and to build new social networks,” he said.
“That’s why, whenever I go to student accommodation conferences, I find there are a swathe of other European countries – such as Spain – who want to emulate some of what we have.”
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