One of the mistakes higher education repeatedly makes is acting as though students only become understandable once they arrive at university.
By the time they walk onto campus, their expectations, habits, politics, communication styles, and sense of identity have already been shaped for years.
If institutions and students’ unions want to remain relevant, we can’t wait until Welcome Week to start understanding them.
We need to be paying attention now – to the culture, pressures, technologies, and communities shaping 16- and 17-year-olds before they ever submit an enrolment form.
So how do SUs engage with the next generation of students while we’re still in planning mode? The answer, as always for me, comes back to one thing – being student-led.
About this time every year, teams up and down the country will be in meeting rooms and Welcome Working Groups, trying to predict the “student vibe” for the upcoming intake. We build programmes, design offers, and shape experiences based on what we think students will want.
But the 18-year-olds heading our way this September aren’t just another iteration of the same cohort. Born in 2008, the Class of 2026 – the so-called “Zalpha” pioneers – is arriving at a time when the old higher education playbooks are being rewritten by AI, a brutal housing market, and a level of post-pandemic pragmatism we haven’t seen in decades.
If we want to reach them, we have to move beyond planning for them and start building with them. That shift sounds straightforward, but in reality it requires us to rethink not just what we do, but how we do it and where control sits within our organisations.
Running the AI
For this cohort, the debate about whether to “allow” generative AI is already over. They’ve moved beyond simply using these tools – they orchestrate them. According to the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) Student Generative AI Survey (2026), 95 per cent of students are now using AI daily. More telling, though, is how they’re using it – less about polishing essays or saving time on assignments, and increasingly for loneliness mitigation and as a constant, always-available source of advice and reassurance.
These students aren’t looking for institutions that attempt to control or limit their use of technology. They’re looking for environments that help them develop the skills that can’t be automated – empathy, ethical judgement, critical thinking, and leadership – while allowing AI to take care of the routine and repetitive.
There’s a tension worth acknowledging here – as students use AI to enhance and personalise their lives, institutions are often responding by making services more efficient, more digital, and more transactional. In trying to modernise, there’s a risk that we strip out the very human interactions that create a sense of connection. Students don’t need us to compete with AI – they need us to provide what AI can’t.
Activist tenants
The Class of 2026 has also come of age in the shadow of a housing crisis that has reshaped its priorities. The idealism that characterised earlier cohorts has been tempered by the reality of rent, contracts, and basic living conditions. Their activism is still present, but it’s more local, more practical, and often more technical.
Housing has become a primary battleground. With 61 per cent of students struggling to meet rent payments, according to the National Student Accommodation Survey (2026), they’re arriving focused on damp conditions, unfair contracts, and inconsistent standards rather than abstract global causes. Many are better versed in the Renters’ Rights Act 2026 than the people managing their accommodation.
What they’re looking for from their SU reflects that shift – less performative campaigning and more concrete results, with advocacy that works, reliable support, and representation that leads to real change.
This is something we already see reflected in advice services across the sector. Certain groups of students remain more likely to need to submit extenuating circumstances, to challenge decisions, or to work through processes that were not designed with them in mind. Over time, that has an impact not just on outcomes, but on how those students experience the institution.
It’s difficult to feel that you belong in a place where you’re repeatedly required to fix the system simply to progress through it.
Discerning and demanding
This is also a cohort that has grown up in a very different social and political climate to those who came before them. They were around eight years old when Donald Trump became president of the United States, and since then they have seen a sustained rise in polarised debate, more visible right-wing rhetoric, and a political environment that often feels unstable and, at times, exclusionary.
Recent reporting from The Guardian, looking at large informal gatherings of teenagers in places like Clapham, highlighted something important. These moments aren’t simply about disruption – they signal that young people actively want to come together, but are increasingly doing so without the spaces, structures, or support to make that connection last. The analysis points to a gap rather than disengagement.
With the long-term decline in youth services and shared community spaces, many young people are left to create their own environments for connection. Those environments can be spontaneous, sometimes chaotic, and not always well-supported – but they exist because the need for belonging hasn’t gone away.
At the same time, they’re living through a society that feels increasingly divided, where engaging across difference can be difficult and, at times, uncomfortable – and that difficulty is, for the most part, a sign of discernment.
They question institutions, expect transparency, and are far less likely to accept messaging at face value – trust has to be earned. They’ve also seen what happens when conversations become performative, hostile, or reduced to noise, which is why they’re looking for spaces where they can shape outcomes, see impact, and be part of something real.
Credibility comes from whether students can see themselves in decisions, systems, and the outcomes that follow – not from how loudly we speak on their behalf.
Portfolio thinkers
Alongside this, we’re seeing a cohort that has little belief in the idea of a “job for life.” They’ve grown up watching entry-level roles become automated while the cost of living continues to rise. In response, they’ve developed what might be described as a “portfolio agency.”
UCAS data shows a 6.9 per cent rise in applications to higher tariff institutions, driven in part by a need to secure a clear return on investment. Many are arriving with side-hustles, freelance work, or personal brands already established, viewing themselves as independent agents who are partnering with an institution to strengthen their prospects.
A cohort that sees itself this way is unlikely to accept a student experience that’s entirely pre-designed – they expect to shape it, influence it, and make it their own.
High literacy, low reserves
We often describe student mental health as being in crisis, but for this cohort it’s closer to a baseline reality. They have the highest levels of mental health literacy we have seen, and they’re far more comfortable talking about it than previous generations. Research from the University of Edinburgh (2025) suggests that one in five young people have accessed specialist care before reaching the age of 18.
What they’re asking for, however, is different from what we’ve traditionally provided – awareness campaigns and one-off initiatives aren’t enough. They’re looking for peer-led, preventative approaches that acknowledge the reality of being constantly connected and often overwhelmed.
I’m not an Ed Sheeran fan – at least not since “The A Team” – but just over ten years ago he wrote, “The club isn’t the best place to find a lover… so the bar is where I go.” It may not be the most academic reference, but it captures something we already understand.
Large, high-energy events are enjoyable – they generate excitement and visibility, and they have their place. But they’re not, in themselves, the mechanism through which belonging is formed. More often, they’re spaces students attend once they already feel connected, rather than the environments that create those connections in the first place.
For a cohort increasingly aware of its own limits, more activity won’t necessarily help – something more student-shaped might.
Let them lead
The Class of 2026 is arriving with a clear sense of what they need and a willingness to shape it, with little patience for surveys that lead nowhere – they want to be involved in the design and delivery of their own experience. We can agree all we like – the harder question is whether we’re prepared to act on it.
At Union, we’ve already started to make that shift – removing our Events Coordinator posts as part of a recent restructure, a deliberate move away from staff-led delivery and towards creating the conditions for student-led activity to emerge, and none of it has been straightforward.
For students used to a certain offer, it’s been a change. For colleagues across the institution, it can look like the Union has suddenly “stopped doing things.” And for our own staff, it has required a real shift – from delivering activity to enabling it, and from controlling outcomes to being comfortable with a degree of uncertainty. It was never going to be a quick transition.
But we’re starting to see the difference. Activity is emerging in ways we wouldn’t have designed ourselves – less predictable, sometimes smaller, but far more owned, and that ownership changes how students engage.
We’re not alone in this thinking. In countries such as Sweden, through traditions like nollning, or in Canada, student leadership is the system itself – it sits at the centre rather than alongside it. Students don’t simply participate – they organise, lead, and shape the experience from the outset.
I’ll admit, part of me is very much trying to justify a Wonkhe study tour to see this first-hand. Selling that idea at home, with four boys – including four-year-old twins – is a tough sell. Though, to be fair, four-year-old twins are basically Student Officers in training – they both demand total autonomy, they’re prone to sudden policy shifts, and they have absolutely no concept of the budget. So it’s research for the home too – I jest, the twins understand a budget, but the point stands.
The sector has known this for years – we’ve simply been slow to commit to it. If we’re serious about engaging the Class of 2026, we need to move beyond refining existing models and be willing to change where power sits – going beyond consultation, getting comfortable stepping back, putting resource directly in students’ hands, and accepting that we’re not the ones who’ll define what “good” looks like.
In practical terms, that looks like cash in their hands, trust in what they do with it, and the willingness to back students to create rather than just attend – including accepting a version of the student experience that is less polished, less predictable, and, at times, less aligned with what we would have chosen ourselves. And that comes with risk.
Not everything will work – some ideas will fall flat, and you might get 20 per cent of it that doesn’t land the way you hoped. The cost of ownership is real. But so is the return – authentic engagement, real communities, and a sense of belonging that is built rather than delivered.
We can continue to design experiences that look successful, are tightly controlled, and are delivered consistently – but are only ever partially owned. Or we can get out of the way, hand over more of the resource, and allow something richer to take shape – even if it is messier, slower, and harder to measure. And we need to be honest with ourselves about what that actually takes.
This is much more like a Championship side building after promotion from League One than a Premier League club buying instant success – you’re developing over time, building culture, backing people, and accepting that progress isn’t always linear – a sporting reference, admittedly, for those Opportunities Coordinators still supporting British Universities & Colleges Sport (BUCS) teams.
There have been countless reports and conference sessions on belonging, and we’re still facing the same issues without really moving on. The Class of 2026, as those before them, is ready to build something new. The question is whether we’re ready to step back enough to let them – and whether we’re comfortable with what happens when we do.
