At first glance, it’s just a concrete block on a busy intersection.
It’s the kind of student accommodation that wouldn’t look out of place on the outskirts of any British university town – functional, a bit tired, the sort of building you’d drive past without a second thought.
Then you notice the garden.
Where you might expect scrubby grass and a few municipal shrubs, there’s a shared growing space bursting with strawberries, Japanese crosnes, and tetragone cornue – a spinach-like vegetable that none of our delegation had heard of.
There’s ecological irrigation using oyas, and a traditional terracotta pots that slowly release water into the soil.
There’s a pétanque court, a barbecue, a carefully covered seating area, and beehives.
And on the facade, there’s a vast street art mural cum climbing wall called “Urban Jungle” by local artist Rosh – tropical plants and colour exploding across the concrete, commissioned specifically for this site.
When we sat down for our talk, they even gave us each a pot of honey from the residence bees.
All of it is built by students. The landscaping was done by the Compagnons du Devoir – France’s ancient guild of craftspeople, think a cross between an apprenticeship scheme and a fraternity – who since 2018 have had a formal partnership with the CROUS de Strasbourg to house their trainees in the same residences as university students – the first such convention in France.
The design was co-created with students, university partners, and neighbours from the surrounding area. The whole space was conceived as a tiers lieu – a “third place” – deliberately blurring the line between student housing and civic amenity.
This is the Résidence Master et Doctorat at 50 Boulevard Charles Stoessel in Mulhouse. It’s a CROUS-managed postgraduate residence. And it was our last stop on Day One of Wonkhe SUs Rhineland study tour.
This week thirty-five officers and staff from UK SUs are spending a week exploring how other countries support students. We’re heading through Germany, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. And within an hour of arriving in Mulhouse, we’ve already found something that makes our delegation wince – not at how different things are here, but at how much we’ve let slip through our fingers back home.
The coffee in the university restaurant is thirty cents. A hot meal – soup, main, vegetables, bread – costs €3.30, or just €1 for scholarship (bursary) holders. Back in the UK, we’d be looking at £3.50 for the coffee and eight quid for lunch, if we’re lucky enough to find somewhere still open after the outsourced catering company decided that student footfall wasn’t worth the staffing costs.
A university that stayed put
Université de Haute-Alsace isn’t trying to be flashy. Established in 1975 and spread across five campuses in Mulhouse and Colmar, it serves a largely local and regional student population – four faculties, two IUTs, two engineering schools, and over 170 degree programmes that mix academic routes with heavily vocational, work-linked provision.
It’s the kind of institution that, viewed from a UK perspective, might be dismissed as “just” a post-92 – except that here, nobody treats it that way.
What’s striking is how integrated UHA is with its place. It has over a thousand apprentices, most of them in first-cycle programmes, with the majority doing their workplace learning within the Haut-Rhin département or the wider Alsace region.
First-cycle students are overwhelmingly local or regional. Placements follow the same pattern – nearly half within the immediate area, over sixty per cent within Alsace. This is a university that educates people where they live, for jobs where they live, without apologising for it.
The contrast with UK policy couldn’t be sharper – where “civic” work amounts to an academic in a shopping centre with a model of a volcano rather than a university embedded in a functioning regional economy. Here, the assumption runs the other way round.
The alphabet soup that actually works
CROUS stands for Centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires – the regional public body responsible for student welfare. Each of France’s academic regions has one, operating under the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. In cities without a CROUS headquarters, there’s a CLOUS – a Centre local – which delivers CROUS services on the ground. Mulhouse has a CLOUS, operating under the CROUS de Strasbourg, which covers the whole of Alsace.
The key thing is what CROUS bodies actually do. They run student accommodation – not as a commercial venture, but as publicly subsidised housing allocated through a national platform. They run university restaurants and cafeterias at nationally regulated prices. They administer means-tested grants and bursaries. They employ social workers and provide emergency financial support. They deliver health and wellbeing services. And – crucially – they programme cultural and community activity for students, funded through the CVEC levy that every enrolled student pays.
This is not an SU – CROUS doesn’t represent students, campaign, or negotiate with universities. Student representation happens through elected student reps who sit on CROUS boards. But it means that the basic infrastructure of student life – food, housing, welfare, social activity – is delivered as a public service, by a public body, at public-service prices, for all students regardless of whether the CFO has fallen out with your SU or under-recruited its internal students.
Le 46
At the postgraduate residence sits a space called “Le 46” – described by CROUS as an espace de vie sociale, a social life space. It’s a modular set of rooms that can be used by students, associations, local partners and community groups, furnished and equipped, available free of charge.
The programme is relentless. Monthly board game nights run with AFEV – a French volunteering charity. There’s “Soirée chill” evenings with pizza and music. Cooking workshops teaching students to make balanced meals on tight budgets, and there’s a monthly brunch diététique with nutrition professionals.
Language exchange evenings happen in English and German, there’s association networking events that bring student groups together with local actors, and there’s an end-of-year guinguette – a traditional French outdoor party – co-delivered with UHA’s student life team, complete with DJ, outdoor cinema screening, and tartes flambées.
This is student civic infrastructure – a publicly funded space deliberately designed to bring students together – with each other, with community organisations, and with the city.
The sports offer runs the same way. There’s free sessions every Tuesday evening and Saturday morning, delivered by a professional coach, advertised through a dedicated “Crous Fit” Facebook group. There’s a “City Stade” meeting point at the residence building for outdoor fitness. Sustainability projects link residences to local food-waste schemes, with prizes of local produce for the halls that sort their waste best.
Where welfare meets representation
If CROUS delivers the infrastructure, who does the representing? At UHA, the most striking actor is CSTE – the Communauté Solidaire des Terres de l’Est, a local independent student union founded in 2020 and affiliated nationally to one of the many national unions, l’Union étudiante.
CSTE’s footprint is impressively wide. It operates across all UHA sites and components, plus non-UHA institutions in the territory – the art school HEAR, the nursing school IFSI and the vocational lycées.
What makes CSTE really interesting is the way it combines welfare delivery with political representation – running mutual aid projects while simultaneously fighting for institutional change.
Les Maraîchers Solidaires buys surplus local organic vegetables from regional growers and redistributes them through monthly marchés solidaires on campus. Any student can access it, no checks, no means-testing. The project explicitly frames itself as combining food access, anti-waste, support for local producers, and “popular education” through recipes and cooking workshops. This is solidarity infrastructure, not charity.
Les culottes menstruelles distributes free period underwear produced locally in the Vosges – 11,000 items distributed across more than ten sites in 2021-22 alone, spanning universities, nursing schools, and vocational lycées. The project was presented to a commission funded through CVEC, and secured €25,000 in support from local institutions and authorities. Survey feedback showed 78.7 per cent of recipients found them “very useful”.
The UK’s equivalent – occasional free period product dispensers in some SU buildings – suddenly looks very thin.
The policy win
And there’s a policy link. CSTE’s most concrete victory is menstrual leave. From September 2025, students across all UHA campuses can take up to 20 half-days of justified absence per academic year for menstrual-related reasons, using a simple form submitted to their component administration within five working days. The certificate is valid for teaching sessions but not scheduled exams, which still require medical evidence.
The timeline tells the story. A motion in CFVU in July 2024 led to an experiment at the law and social sciences faculty from October 2024. A visibility campaign using micro-trottoirs – vox pop interviews – to build awareness – followed. Then, on 24 April 2025, policy generalised across the entire university.
Beyond CSTE, UHA also has a dense thicket of student associations in various categories supported both by the CLOUS and the university’s BVE – the Student Life Office (BVE).
There’s peer community and integration – the amicales and BDEs at each IUT and engineering school that function as everyday belonging infrastructure. Amicale GEII has a room where you can “come and sit”, eat, meet people across cohorts, play games. Amicale GMP emphasises its dedicated space with low-cost snacks to maintain cohesion. This is the third-space provision that UK commuter campuses desperately need and rarely have.
There’s genuine “by students for students” service delivery. Génie Bicyclette runs regular bike repair sessions with tools and volunteer help – not a pop-up stall once a term, but a standing service for the campus community. AJETTS, in the translation masters, provides actual translation services to external clients. HAC delivers chemistry projects for professional clients and companies. These are quasi-professional operations embedded in the student experience.
There’s cultural production. Chipo’Zik has run a campus festival on Illberg since 2005 and programmes Chipo’Nights through the year. The Bureau des Arts at the chemistry school produces a humour-inflected culture journal, runs pottery and painting workshops, organises cultural outings. ENSCMulticolore exists specifically to preserve and transmit the school’s heritage collection of dyes and dyed textiles – institutional memory as student activity.
There’s environmental and civic work. Aphyse runs clean walks, battery and printer cartridge collection, eco-product sales, waste sorting infrastructure – plus, intriguingly, safety training, risk evaluation, and road safety prevention. That reads less like a society and more like a student-led public health and sustainability portfolio.
And there’s professional identity and alumni networking. ADETAM supports archivistics students through funded educational trips then transitions them to work via job sharing and graduate events. Regio Chimica maintains solidarity and professional relationships among alumni of a cross-border chemistry degree. iCom deliberately builds networks between alumni and current students.
The common thread is that none of them are purely social. Even the amicales providing sofas and cheap snacks are doing integration work, mixing cohorts, building the informal glue that holds an institution together.
Students and the city
What CROUS, CSTE, and the associations have in common is that they treat students as part of a place – not as a transient consumer population, but as residents with civic presence.
CSTE has organised Pride de Mulhouse annually since 2022, explicitly positioning it as political and locally anchored. The 2025 event – starting at Square de la Bourse, ending at the Motoco arts venue – included an association village, drag show, DJ set, and a “safe team” throughout. This is an SU organising a city event, not just attending one.
The artist residency model goes the other way. La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, UHA’s cultural service, and CLOUS Mulhouse together host artists in residence on campus – commissioning work that uses the university setting, with students as participants alongside local cultural actors and city residents. During the annual Journées des Arts et de la Culture dans l’Enseignement Supérieur, campus activities are explicitly opened to “the public of the city”. The university becomes a civic cultural venue.
This is what embedding looks like – students contributing to, and drawing from, existing cultural and social ecosystems, vocational and academic learners sharing spaces, and non-students present as collaborators rather than audiences. The result normalises students as residents in a way that UK practice increasingly fails to do.
In the mix
One thing that kept coming up in conversation was how naturally CLOUS Mulhouse mixes different types of students – and different types of people.
Because CROUS services attach to student status, not to a specific university or programme, students from academic and vocational routes share the same residences, the same restaurants, and the same social spaces. IUT students doing applied technology degrees sit next to engineering students doing research-track programmes. Nursing students from IFSI use the same CSTE food distributions as arts students from HEAR.
And at the Master Doctorat residence, PhD candidates share corridors with Compagnons du Devoir apprentices – young people training as stonemasons, carpenters, and metalworkers through France’s ancient guild system. The convention that brought them together was the first of its kind in the country.
The CLOUS programming deliberately invites non-students into partnership. Events run with local charities, media organisations, cultural institutions. Association networking brings student groups together with “local actors” – the phrase kept recurring. Sustainability projects involve local producers and community partners. The residences aren’t sealed enclaves – they’re porous to the city.
There’s a framework in the academic literature that distinguishes between three types of social capital. Bonding capital is what you get from finding others like you – course mates, subject communities, people who share your background. Bridging capital comes from interaction with people not like you – networks between socially heterogeneous groups. And linking capital connects you with external institutions that can enhance your access to resources, ideas and information beyond your immediate community.
What struck us about Mulhouse is how systematically the system delivers all three – not as an accident, but as an explicit design principle.
The amicales and BDEs at each faculty and school provide bonding capital for subject communities, with their dedicated rooms and low-cost snacks and cross-cohort mixing. The CROUS residences and restaurants, by attaching eligibility to student status rather than institution or programme, create bridging capital between academic and vocational students, between PhD researchers and guild apprentices, between nursing students and engineers.
And the CLOUS programming – the association networking events, the artist residencies, the partnerships with local charities and cultural institutions, the participation in city governance – builds linking capital that connects students to the civic infrastructure of the place where they live.
In the UK, it sometimes feels like we’ve defaulted to a model of atomised individualism where “getting involved” means CV-building skills acquisition, where students are positioned as consumers to be served rather than citizens to be organised, and where the only social capital that counts is the kind you can list in a graduate attribute framework.
Thirty cents for a coffee, two euros thirty for a meal, a pot of honey from the residence bees, a publicly funded social space where students and community partners can meet, an association ecology where bike repairs, chemistry consulting, and textile heritage preservation all count as student activity, PhD students and stonemasons sharing corridors, and artist residencies that blur the line between campus and city.
None of this is utopian. It’s just what happens when you decide that students are citizens with social capital to build – not customers with skills to acquire.
To Strasbourg in the morning, when amongst other things, we’ll look at France’s controversial new international education strategy. De rien.
