Are we entering an era of students mainly picking a local uni and commuting?

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/sep/13/rise-of-student-commuters-costs-living-at-home-or-in-halls

With the expense of student loans and general cost of living pressures coupled with exponentially increasing IT impact are we now going into be in a position of students maybe by default choosing a local university.

My concern would be maybe more academic kids from poorer backgrounds maybe going for a local option rather than going for maybe a better HEI which is more distant. Obviously Oxbridge may offer cheap accommodation but the students going there are from predominantly middle class backgrounds with parents I would hazard a guess maybe would be able to support their children anyway.. I think the problem will be with other Russell group institutions including London unis, Durham, Bristol, Edinburgh etx. where there may be some distance to travel.

Is this commuting student model really a good thing?

We have a uni at the end of the road but both my children have chosen to go to ones 5 hours away and take out massive loans. They wanted the full experiences, they didn't want to stay at home.

It may be one of the most important trends to utterly change university education in the UK, I think. Eventually it'll have a financial knock-on effect for various cities and localities, as landlords stop making as much money, clubs and student bars fold or reduce hours, and local shops and eateries lose a lot of their custom. Maybe that'll mean more homes freed up for local families, who knows?

Bristol has just opened a massive new building right by Temple Meads (the area itself is itself undergoing some regeneration) in order to respond to more and more students commuting, but I'm not sure I can see how this'll work out. Will it only apply to certain courses/modules? Will teaching have to be replicated in this massive building for the students who are coming in by train and popping over the road? And in which case, where are all the extra teaching hours going to come from? How are lecturers getting from their departments up in Clifton down to Temple Meads? It's not an easy logistic thing to arrange. Apparently the buildings are also looking to host conferences and research meetings for academics and industry who don't have the time to travel further into the city.

I think the trend is inevitable - perhaps many British universities will become largely ghost towns, the residential halls lived in mostly by international students and very little social stuff going on.

But as a lot of people have pointed out, commuting to your local university isn't always feasible. Our local university is Oxford. Great, if you can get in ... My own son's doing a rather niche degree scheme which only about 5 institutions in the country are offering! He could just about have commuted to where he's just started, but I did some back-of-envelope maths regarding a season ticket and based on his current Halls fees, and the difference (in favour of commuting) was in the hundreds, not thousands! Plus time, missing out on independence and meeting new people ...

So the students are chosing education (if the local offering matches their preferences) over the experience of the student life. Sounds sensible.

I suppose the institutions with the highest added value will be ok, and the rest will have to adapt.
Picking the best fitting school within reasonable distance (even if going for the halls there) might turn better long-term choice, if the person stays in the area, they can combine uni friends and connections with having the family and school friends reasonably close. Win-win.

Coventry here so my son will not be going to a uni far away from us. He said leaving is not an option as he has a season ticket for Coventry City. Lol. Fine by me.

Depending on results, it will be Coventry, BCU, Birmingham, Aston or Warwick. Uni is a bit of a waste of time as it is these days, I don’t need him dossing in student accommodation that isn’t even fit for passing health and safety regs nine times out of ten.

I just cannot see the benefit these days.

It’s a pity. Leaving home for uni was a right of passage for many. Freshers week and late nights and daft stuff. Learning to cook and do your washing

this will be the preserve of the wealthy. As it was before.

With you on that one.

Yes, I think we are, and I think it's a massive shame - for students and for universities alike. It is killing societies, sports clubs, and so on, and the general culture of universities.

I'm from Glasgow and me and the vast majority of my school friends stayed at home and went to a uni in Glasgow in the late 90s. Going elsewhere wasn't even considered by us if you got into one of the Glasgow Unis as financially it made no sense. I think I'm right in saying that over half of the undergraduates at Glasgow uni lived at home. Three decades on and my cousins' children are all following the same path - none have moved to go to uni. But where I live now (English city) it seems the majority don't go to the local unis (Russell Group and a post-92).

Whilst I agree, we can't ignore the devastating impact on the Covid lockdowns and how "some" universities took the restrictions to extremes. At my son's Uni, loads of clubs/societies never started again after they were outlawed for a year. There were several college "bars" on campus and about half of them closed down. Likewise there was a good range of shops and even a bank branch that had to close and some never re-opened. It's left quite a vacuum in the heart of the campus. The Uni has "covered it up" to an extent by moving offices into empty shops and turning the closed down bars into common rooms, so new visitors wouldn't really notice, but those of us who knew it before Covid (and students who were there over Covid) know what has been lost. Loads of students who went in 2000 (my son's cohorts) never returned to live on campus and either gave up their courses or studied remotely for years 2 and 3 after being sent home at Christmas 2000 with no refunds for the campus accommodation they'd paid for! Unis have a lot to answer for, for the unnecessary damage they caused themselves by their over-zealous approach to going far beyond what the actual lockdown/restrictions required.

I don’t think this is a bad thing, provided it does not limit opportunities for them.

Previous generations have been naive about costs and they are now paying the price for that. It is very normal in a lot of countries (Australia being one of them) to go to university in your home city if there is one or more locally. I commuted from home for my first degree and also worked throughout. I shared a small house with flatmates during my second degree and continued to hold down jobs. While I still had debt from tuition fees, I did not have any debt from my living costs, in spite of spending many years as a student. This was very normal in my culture.

I actually think a lot of British graduates in my era (early noughties) were a bit spoiled with the system of going away to university, partying a lot, not working and then complaining about debt at the end of it all. It’s a bit like the welfare mindset causing problems in the UK generally, expecting something for free that others pay for!

That’s not my experience at all. The vast majority of my 5th and 6th year moved away from home to study, that was back in the 90s.

This isn’t new, although it may be much more common now.

Over 30 years ago, for several years I taught a first year course at a local poly-turned-university. It was a ‘twilight’ class, either 4 - 7pm or 5 - 8pm, IIRC. I was told this was because a significant number of their students lived up to two hours away by train, so their courses were timetabled in a way that meant they attended on only two days a week. Those two were very full and long days.

Back then I thought, as many upthread do, that they were missing out on a lot. However, it’s a practical solution if having a degree is so important for the careers they want to follow.

It's been going on for a long time. Back in the 1960s, when hardly anyone went, and you got a whacking big grant, there were no worries. But even in the 1990s I knew people who commuted because they couldn't afford the fees.

I went to my local Uni and lived at home. No way was I going to go thousands of pounds into debt in order to get a 2:1 in history and literature!! I guess it would be worth it if you had a place at Oxford or Cambridge. Other than that, go local.

@BoredZelda definitely the case in 90s South Lanarkshire many travelled in by train* to Glasgow (best suburban rail network outside of London) either to Strathclyde / Caledonian in centre or 10 mins on underground to Glasgow University. Most friends I made were relatively local - the farthest away was a Geordie.
*no drivers

Yup, when I did my chartered accountancy qualifications at a local Poly, alongside a full time job, I managed to get day release (at a cost of a days' pay!!), and the classes were one day per week, 9am to 9pm, where the pupils were a mix of day release workers like me, or Poly students who did other modules on different days. The timetabling was deliberately so that those who were working only had to take one day off work and do all their lessons on one very long day. It was a 3 year course, and each year had a different day of the week. Students on different degrees/diplomas (i.e. business & finance etc) attended some of the classes of relevance to their course, i.e. the accounting lectures were jam packed, but the tax lectures were pretty quiet as far fewer courses included tax - it was mostly the chartered/certified accountants courses.

@Dappy777 That’s incredibly bad advice. There are many very good universities where dc will get a decent earnings premium - especially in some disciplines like Economics and Law. Going to a local university that’s mediocre in a low wage local economy is ridiculous if dc could have gone to LSE or Bristol (LNAT) for law. It’s saying to a student - don’t aim high - stay in your disadvantaged town. We need students to understand the difference between universities and courses and the need to aim high for a better earnings premium. That still exists very strongly for some degrees and not just Oxbridge.

If we don’t do this we have even more two tier levels of grads than we have now and the poorest are the most risk averse. Yet, they can get the biggest loans and bursaries not available to the middle classes. So they should aim high because they get the higher levels of funding.

Im not sure when the era was when students paid their own tuition fees for full time courses? Part time is entirely different as are part time professional qualification courses.

Exactly my experience in the late 90s too - many friends I made at Glasgow Uni were from north and South Lanarkshire and commuting in by train. Others like me were travelling by bus from outer suburbs, or towns and villages to the north and south of Glasgow. As you say, central Scotland's transport network does facilitate commuting from home from quite a wide radius - arguably much more so than in many other parts of the UK. I can't remember anyone having a car.

Of course others were from further afield in Scotland and beyond and they stayed in halls in first year then student flats (student houses - as opposed to flats - was a new thing for me when I moved to England).

just a note for anyone on stem degrees - you can get all tuition fees covered plus up to £7k in bursary and pay if you sign up with the military, you also have a job straight from your degree, not something that is guaranteed usually! My dc really loves the job

I think Scotland has a different attitude to staying at home and has done for decades and certainly is not going to change very soon. However people living remotely do need to consider the best universities for certain subjects and they need to move away from home.

@bababamamayeah you just have to agree for your skills to be used to develop weapons to kill someone - could be a baddie, could be a civilian or a child. DS2 views these disdain. Imagine what an awful place the world would be if we all could be bought.

My son in London was at uni in that period - ended up giving up in year 2 , and going back into a job ( he went at 21 and luckily had a career to fall back on) it was not only all the covid issues, no seeing anyone, no seminars, no social scene but also 3 months previous of lecturers on strike - and they were all paying for the privilege - I honestly think those at uni in 2020 or 2021 should get their fees for them cancelled off - they were paying for what wasn’t delivered

Depends if you're down west. It took me 100 minutes to do 30 miles on Thursday to get up the A30 towards Launceston. I was never as grateful to get to Strawberry Fields!

@PocketSand You had better hope others will fight for us then. Hopefully not everyone will refuse.

I'd prefer our dcs to go away to uni as the social experience will be better, and it's good for them to have that independence and shared living with other young people. However, we're very fortunate to have excellent universities within walking distance as we're in London (zone 2, not a commuter suburb). The prospect of much lower living costs, and some of the best universities in the world for certain subjects, will be hard to ignore.

Inner cities are rather unfashionable places to live now for families (colleagues looked at us like we had two heads when we said we'd be raising our dcs here rather than a naice zone 5 suburb) so it will be interesting to see if better access to higher ed (and early career jobs) would make them more popular for families of teens and young adults. I have friends who proudly showed off the big detached house they could afford by moving out of the centre but now their teenage son is quite envious of the short commutes we have.

Some unis managed it better than others