- Students say they need to save and earn money while at university to compensate for stagnant maintenance loans and high accommodation costs
- Degrees are seen as the key to a good job, but financial pressure forces students into earning and commuting alongside their studies
- Many students say that between studying and earning, they no longer have time for the social and extracurricular opportunities that university offers
Today the UPP Foundation publishes Fulfilment and outcomes, a qualitative investigation into the nature of the nature of the student experience on and off campus in 2025.
In order to explore the student experience in 2025, the UPP Foundation conducted focus groups in person with residential students at different income levels and virtual focus groups with commuter students, in both cases recruiting from the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University. The conversations brought to the surface a number of findings that shed new light on students as cautious, pragmatic and constrained agents working within a system that offers limited financial support.
The main findings are as follows:
- The question of how much a university lifestyle costs now underpins how all students see their student experience. The students we spoke to said that they felt that it was them (rather than the university, the government, the OfS or any other body) who took responsibility for ensuring that they could afford to both study and socialise.
- Students told us that the maintenance loan is insufficient to support the residential student experience, and that this creates a sequence of negative, unintended consequences. Residential and commuter students agreed that reviewing both the size and thresholds for maintenance loans would make it easier to participate in the full student experience.
- Students see the ‘point’ of university as getting the skills and qualifications they need to get on the job ladder – the value of a degree is more instrumental than intrinsic. The investment that students make in their education now has much less room for enjoyment; the purpose of university has tilted much more towards a degree being a route towards a secure and well-remunerated job.
- The combination of the cost of learning and the instrumental value of degrees means that students now have higher expectations of their university experience – and universities aren’t meeting them. This manifests itself in demands such as better transport provision, more stringent requirements for landlords in student towns, and high-quality teaching and learning.
- Commuter students feel that some aspects of the student experience are harder for them to access, but where they are able to do so, they find it fulfilling and enjoyable. These students were conscious that commuting impinges upon their ability to engage in spontaneous and low-stakes social elements of the student experience.
- Most commuter students we spoke to had become commuter students in order to save money. They attested to the challenge of juggling commuting with earning money, but several said that having a part-time job was a lifeline.
In light of the findings, the paper argues that the two pathways available for maintaining a broad and rich student experience with successful outcomes are expanding the core curriculum or bringing down the cost of accessing student life. These are the two components of university that students see as non-negotiable; targeting either involves difficult and costly political and economic tradeoffs.
Having covered the discrepancies in access to higher education in the inquiry’s introductory paper, the second paper in the inquiry focused on how in cold spot areas see university study as a ‘bad bet’. Taking this report and the follow-up paper to the Student Futures Manifesto as its starting-points, this third paper in the inquiry set out to explore how undergraduates feel about their student experience as the ‘cost-of-learning crisis’ continues to affect university life.
Richard Brabner, Executive Chair of the UPP Foundation, said: “Our work in Doncaster showed that people in cold-spot communities still see university as a place where students go to party for three years without any thought of what they’ll do next. Our research from Nottingham shows that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Both commuters and residential students are rational, cost-conscious young adults making savvy and often difficult decisions about how to make university affordable in the present and a core component of their future success. If we want to help them use it to develop into well-rounded individuals as well – and the students we spoke to told us that we should – we need to give them ways to make the student experience more affordable and their study more enriching.”
