More students are choosing to live at home while studying, and universities are adapting their courses and campuses to suit them. The Guardian spoke to several this weekend, and the detail in their accounts is more instructive than the trend itself.
Lucy Brazier, a second-year business management student, lives near Colchester and commutes to the University of Essex. She calls it the obvious choice for her course once she weighed the costs, and she is not short-changed on access: overnight rooms are available on campus at £35 booked less than a day ahead, which she has used after nights out and before exams.
George Charlton, twenty-five, studying economics at Manchester Metropolitan, described the part that does not appear in the budget. He was going into lectures thinking about how quickly he could get on the train to get back. The university now runs monthly commuter chat and chill sessions and is trialling post-lecture sessions so commuting students can stay on campus and skip the rush-hour crush. There is definitely a demand for it, he says.
Read that sentence again, because it is the whole economics of a university town in one line. There is definitely a demand for a reason to stay.
Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute urges students to look past the immediate costs to the bigger picture, and he is right, but the bigger picture is not only about the student.
A university town has never really been a place with a university in it. It is a place where eighteen thousand people with irregular timetables and no domestic obligations are present, continuously, from September to June. That is the raw material. The late bookshop, the cheap curry house, the venue that does bands on a Tuesday, the cafe that lets somebody sit with one americano for four hours in February: none of those are viable on lecture-hour footfall. They are viable on the hours between things, and on the evening.
Take the evening out and the whole apparatus starts to fail in a specific order. Late trade goes first, because it is the thinnest. Then the places that depended on late trade for their margin shorten their hours, which removes the reason to stay for the people who might have stayed. Then the town becomes a place you leave at six, which makes commuting more obviously correct for the next cohort, which removes more evenings.
That loop runs on its own. Nobody decides it.
What Manchester Metropolitan is doing with those post-lecture sessions is, in commercial terms, an attempt to manufacture a reason to remain on site for ninety minutes. It is a small intervention and it is aimed at exactly the right variable. A student who stays until seven is a student who eats somewhere, meets somebody, and forms the attachment that makes the next three years feel like a place rather than a commute.
The individual decision is unarguable. Rent is the largest line in a student budget and removing it is the single most effective financial move available. Brazier’s arrangement, with a £35 room when she needs one, is close to the best of both, and it is a genuinely good piece of design by her university.
But the aggregate of eighteen thousand sensible individual decisions is a town with the lights going off at six, and no individual student caused that or can fix it.
The lecture has a timetable. The friendship does not.
Source: The Guardian, “Rise of the student commuters: weighing the costs of living at home or in halls”
