Now here’s a thing. I’ve been banging on about student accommodation needing to operate more like hotels for commuter students for years. And now on a day trip 90 minutes from Malmö, I’ve found an example. Almost.
“Bed and Study” is a concept that was developed by a group of nursing students at Kristianstad University, a lovely little campus university a mile or so from the centre of Skåne’s fourth largest urban area.
During the pandemic, most teaching and assessment was moved online – but for this group, who still needed to get to campus, the stress and cost of the commute, along with unsuitable space at home, were proving to be real barriers to successful completion.
So a plot was hatched between the municipality, the university and the SU. The Studio takes some barely used conference rooms in one of the city’s hotels and and makes it, along with its WiFi and free tea and coffee, available to students.
The Hotel Night allows students to stay a couple of days in one of three for a vastly reduced price – so that students don’t have to commute back and forth during, for example, exams, group projects or block teaching.
And for new students that have applied for student housing and are waiting to move in, there’s the opportunity to stay in one of five hotels at an even more discounted price at the beginning of a semester – with breakfast chucked in.
It all proved to be so popular – and so helpful – that long since what amounted to restrictions in Sweden being lifted – that it’s still running now.
What’s interesting to me is the circumstances under which that kind of creative problem solving – led by a group of students – were possible.
A good study and living environment
Every year Sveriges Förenade Studentkårer – Sweden’s NUS – awards the Student City of the Year award to a place that its panel thinks excels in its work to create a good study and living environment for students.
The criteria are quite strict – the city has to be proactive in offering secure access to functional student housing with reasonable rent, there has to be good access to leisure activities, recreation, green areas and convenient transport options to and from campus, and there have to be good opportunities for a rewarding working life and existence in the city after a students’ studies.
Winning cities have to have a functioning and inclusive system for student influence, where students’ perspectives and initiatives are utilised at all different levels – and where Initiatives from students are promoted and taken advantage of.
And the winner has to show well-functioning collaboration between the university, the SU, the municipality, the region and employers – where students’ interests and needs are in focus.
The various actors have to work together to bring about initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in students’ lives and for the student city’s future, and students have to be seen as a major partner and key to the city’s development.
And cities, and universities, are very very keen to win.
So high are the standards that sometimes SFS refuses to give out the award at all. In 2022, for example, it instead offered feedback to the multiple applicants in a bid to get them to intensify their work toward the award:
To meet our demands requires hard work and active leadership from several parties, and unfortunately this year’s applicants have not reached all the way. However, we know that promising progress is being made in many cities around the country, and we look forward to visiting them before next year’s edition of Student City of the Year, says Linn Svärd, chairman of the Swedish National Union of Students.
240 companies together with 4,860 students
Back in 2020 the pro-rector at Kristianstad, the municipality leader and the SU President were so committed to winning that they agreed to dedicate the university’s ToY Imagine event to coming up with ideas to clinch the win.
Four years prior a university lecturer and an innovation advisor had met on a flight to Brussels, where they discussed revamping a traditional leadership course for nursing students.
By the time they’d landed, they’d sketched out transforming the course’s standard written assignment into a dynamic two-day conference with lectures, workshops, and a group presentation in front of an external jury.
It launched in the spring semester of 2017, and the active participation and innovation among students saw them source materials and funding for soundproof walls and a colour-changing catheter.
Now it’s spread its way across the programmes at the university, runs several times a year, often involves interdisciplinary teams of students and involves businesses that the university is trying to build careers relationships with:
Suddenly everything fell into place! Replacing a regular submission task with “real life” – it felt fun, different and completely neat. In this way, the students would get outside the academic box, meet people from other fields and be forced to start thinking themselves.
And it’s not just “Bed and Study” that came from that “let’s win student city” year. Student cultural events, city-wide discount schemes and a new entrepreneurs strategy with local and regional businesses have also flowed from the initiative.
One platform aims to connect students, alumni, and businesses to improve education quality and facilitate smoother transitions into the workforce, featuring a dynamic interface with interactive ads. Another platform addresses employer-employee gaps in work hours and styles by offering quick digital interviews and feedback, speeding up recruitment processes and fostering flexibility.
An Open Space HUB in northeast Scania will be a collaborative area to unite different sectors, promoting long-term engagement and shared goals. Another initiative seeks to prepare society for an uncertain future through a lifelong learning program involving various stakeholders.
Students designed a system support tool to enhance project management by identifying potential risks and solutions early on. And to address social isolation and economic challenges, a comprehensive approach to using hemp was developed to create community farming spaces, develop cost-effective hemp-based vehicle fuels, and promote hemp as a nutritious food source.
And those projects will now all be led by students.
Some of this, as ever in Sweden, flows from legislation that both values student participation and funds students to have the time to do it. But it’s also about a determination to create the projects and scaffolds that can enable students to innovate and create initiatives themselves, in their own interest – because that’s what we’ll need graduates to do in the future.
