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?

There are at our local inner city FE college. They are relatively new, but they do exist now.

That's true.

But until now there's been a "brain drain" effect with young people leaving their home towns to move to cities for university (and often staying there after graduating) - that's got downsides too.

Uni of Glasgow is nearly 40% international now. So many expensive private halls there.
It blew my mind listening to American parents saying how cheap Glasow is it’s only £30,000 a year and how safe (they meant lack of guns)

Some colleges offer degrees accredited by a university. Blackpool college popped up on my feed offering business degrees in 2 years accredited by Lancaster university, no one would know you hadn’t actually been to Lancaster. A local college randomly offers one accredited by a Welsh uni (we are in Lancashire)

@Moreholidaysthanjudithchalmers They would. It’s a 2 year degree!

This will be a problem with campus unis - again it can be mitigated (Nottingham Uni has trams, or you could have a shuttle bus (although that would be slower) or you could have hire bikes & a cycle superhighway as they do in the Netherlands) but these things aren’t easy to do & restrict the distance people could travel.

Even if people drive, then you would need a sizeable increase in parking spaces on or around the uni (which judging by school parking issues near me could be problematic if this is street parking). Congestion is also a real issue that would limit driving - where I live there are some directions that are easy to drive at peak times, but there are also others where the traffic is very slow.

I agree with your point about the local economy too.

I do see why more students are choosing to stay at home as it seems an inevitable consequence of student debt being so high. But currently it’s not an option for everyone.

@coldcalling Not many downsides! Students do want decent paying work. Going home often won’t provide that. That means local employers must offer more attractive careers or we just say some grads don’t get as much out of being a grad as they should. That also has knock on effects for the country. They pay less of their loans back and are not as economically active as they should be, paying less tax is a good example. So I can see why good grads are more likely to be concentrated in more dynamic areas but they need to be.

I think Lincolnshire has the lowest grad opportunities so why would Lincoln students stay there or go home to there?Theres just not enough grad jobs to go around.

They offer standard 3 year too.
I just mentioned 2 year as it caught my eye. Not just business several subjects. Blackpool & Fylde if you want to look.

But that'll continue as the small towns etc probably won't have colleges near enough for daily commutes if they don't have any substantive local employment. I'd like to be optimistic to think that the government would roll out a program of building new colleges out in the deprived regions to cater for students wishing to stay home, but I don't really think it'll happen. Far more likely that some of the financially troubled unis (usually in big towns/cities) will either convert back to colleges/Polys or start offering a broader range of courses etc., but again, that only benefits those who live close enough to them, i.e. large towns/cities.

There used to be though. That's part of the problem. The centralisation of jobs into a handful of big cities leaving a vacuum/void out in the regions. There was a time when even small towns had a broad range of employers including public sector, manufacturing, retail, banking, insurance, professional services, etc., but in some towns you'd now be hard pressed to find anything other than minimum wage retail and hospitality and care work.

Figures I see are 46.1 % commuting to uni while living at home in Scotland - 35.1% in NI and 30.1% in England and only 21% of students doing it in Wales. I'd have thought wales would be higher as local uni are very much pushed to the students here.

DD1 is planning masters and commuting in - she's lucky there a well regarded course at nearby uni.

When I was with Open Unievrsity a decade plus ago they were already seeing more 18 year olds tudying with them - but on a recent thread that idea was greated with horror from many posters as worst thing possible.

The local college here also does degree courses. Quiet a few uni DD2 was looking at have high numbers of local students at them - though many do live first year on campus at least.

It is a lot of money to start life in debt with - but expect it will be a slow increasing trend as years go by that anything that keeps the costs down will increasingly happen.

Crumbs.

When I was at QM Hall, I recall we had a handful of American students staying there at most, though there were several Greek boys who were studying Naval architecture.

Wales has a much more generous loan system plus additional none repayable grant, I suppose that factors in. Most welsh yp can borrow enough to live away if they want to.

That's skewed by the very high proportion of international postgraduate students. I think if you look at undergraduate only it's around 20%. From a quick Google, 30-40% of undergraduates at Glasgow live at home and 60% of undergraduates have a permanent home address within 40 miles of campus (not sure how accurate/up to date these figures are).

My cousins' children all live in and around Glasgow and are commuting to Strathclyde, Glasgow, Stirling, Caledonian, UWS, and even Edinburgh. So lots of choice without having to move out.

Yes it varies by undergraduate and postgraduate and by course. My dd is common law so by its nature there’s virtually no Scottish students on course, lots of international. Scots law in contrast is of course 100% Scottish students and my dd gets impression lots (most?) live at home. I’m always struck by huge numbers of private halls in Glasgow though and more being built. The uni has events for commuters though in freshers so commuting definitely a big thing.

@Badbadbunny I think the mixed economy model in smaller-mid sized towns has long departed. Where I live anyway. The NHS, education and local government have long been the main grad employers here and they still are. There’s a few solicitors and accountants, but not much else and retail banking didn’t bother with grads back in the day. Manufacturing didn’t employ grads and retail didn’t either. M&S had their grads at HQ in London, as did other chain stores, and Tesco were in Hertfordshire. So many grads commuted to London from here or worked for the state. Not much has changed except grads are doing non grad work quite often.

My local poly-turned-university offers a degree in Musical Theatre. As well as being in the college’s productions, some students on the course take part in local am dram groups’ musicals, too, which involves two or three evening rehearsals a week plus some Sundays. Then seven shows in a week - but it’s all good experience and related to the course.

I chatted to someone recently who was playing the lead in one of the local groups’ productions: he told me he also works as a (the?) manager at a local branch of a fast food chain, I imagine because he needs the income.

So working there perhaps 3-4 times a week, plus our rehearsals. I just can’t see how he finds enough time for his course.

Interesting to see the "more common in Scotland" posts. I have 3 gone through uni in Scotland, 2 of which went locally, one a bit further, and all 3 moved out to do so.
I encouraged them to do this as I think you get so much more life experience/ uni experience from being away from your parents and being on campus.

@ALoveOnceNewHasNowGrownOld Id argue the course should never ever be a degree at a university like an ex poly. A theatre school like Sylvia Young is a better route for talented dc or Mountview for musical theatre. I wonder how many students actually get work afterwards in musical theatre.

I couldn’t comment on that as I don’t know the course well enough. There are far more people who’d like careers in musical theatre than Mountview can accommodate.

The only person I know who teaches on the course is currently in the professional tour of a musical, having had a long run as one of the leads in a West End musical.

I particularly remember one of their graduates as he was very kind and thoughtful during a couple of shows we were both involved in. He’s now in a very popular show in the West End (ensemble and understudying two leads) and also in a continuing CBBC series.

They may not be typical of the course. However, I know possibly a dozen women locally who went to Mountview or similar well respected London colleges and who are no longer working professionally, never having been in anything major. Possibly half of them were at Mountview. It’s a precarious profession, particularly if you don’t live in London or have family who can support you in your early career.

@ALoveOnceNewHasNowGrownOld It’s no profession for the majority and having a student loan for it is pretty dire. It’s probably free training for most as they don't get jobs but I don’t think it should be a degree.

I think this is correct. One of the issues with encouraging all young people to attend university and aspire to graduate jobs is that it hollows out towns, indeed parts of the country, where there are not graduate jobs whereas in another era more brains would have stayed put. The graduates who return home to small towns after their degrees to non-graduate roles are likely to be the less dynamic ones and also a bit depressed about that when peers have move onwards and upwards. Western societies have increasingly moved towards education being a massive geographic sorting system with winners and losers.

60% of young people don't go to University though, and they are still more likely to be NEETS than graduates and are less likely to be able to progress to higher levels later on in their careers. The problem isn't at the student end, it's with the choices young people have. A large cohort of young people have no hope of going to University because they don't have L3 qualifications. Historically poor funding of FE colleges and the lack of supply, which is caused in large part to a lack of vocational staff means these YP have nowhere to go. Electricians don't want to bother being paid £25 an hour to teach a bunch of teenagers ( especially when they have to do a teaching qualification). Then we have the dearth of alternatives to degree level education that is not University where one apprenticeship place has 200 applicants and means there is a serious lack of alternatives to University. But it's cheaper to blame YP for going to University than it is to call out businesses for not wanting to bother training young people or providing properly funded vocational education.

Uni numbers are going to crater in the next 2-3 years once it becomes abundantly clear studying for a degree is utterly pointless in the AI age.

Dd25 moved straight to a flat in her uni town, renting with a friend. Halls were too expensive. Still there doing part time masters whilst working.

DD24 went into halls at hers and then student hovels lets. But ended up commuting to our local uni for postgrad.
Was glad youngest did the live away experience first though. She has grown up immeasurably.