Way back in 2019, the Augar review stated that students living away from home for university was part of a “deep-seated culture.”
By extension, it inferred that living at home – in whatever home looks like for an individual – was abnormal or uncommon.
Six years on and it really feels like this narrative is changing. Whilst I’ve written on the site before about the sector being at cross purposes when talking about the student group, the acknowledgement and discussion of commuter students and their experiences is on the increase.
As Wonkhe’s commuter student series has demonstrated, there are many students, scholars, policy makers and practitioners doing some excellent work to highlight the challenges faced by commuter students in higher education.
Whilst the narrative might be changing, what is less discussed is some of the benefits of commuting for students.
In my PhD research whilst students spoke of long and difficult journeys, struggling to park on campus or counterintuitive academic timetabling, they also spoke about the positives of their experiences. It’s these that I think are an important starting point for those looking to know more about this student group.
Challenging the narrative
Simply put, not all students want to live in student accommodation. Some prefer to live with family. Mature students don’t necessarily want to live with younger students or uproot their family units into family accommodation options.
For those who have been in full-time employment to starting their studies, they saw the commute as just part of a working day.
One of the students in my study specifically told me that they didn’t expect their institution to do anything special for them as a commuter because commuting was just “what you do” in order to get to class.
For the wider student experience, a number of students in my research participated in multiple extra-curricular activities and had numerous friends they’d met through these, as well as on their commute or on their course. One commuter even elected to get a rail replacement bus at a weekend to participate in their sports club. Anyone who has ever taken a rail replacement bus will know that this isn’t a decision taken lightly.
In all these instances, commuter students demonstrated either the positive benefits of commuting, or that they were able to participate in university life irrespective of their commute.
I’m not trying to say that all commuter student experiences are positive. Unless you hold an amount of luck, you’re going to be late to class at some point due to some kind of transport issue. We’ve all been there, stood waiting for a bus that doesn’t turn up or a train that’s delayed. It’s frustrating and sometimes (read, often) it makes you late to class.
What I am saying is that this deficit narrative of commuter students often does them a bit of a disservice and ends up homogenising their experiences in a way that isn’t always that useful if we’re trying to think about how to improve their experience.
It’s not you, it’s me
Instead of thinking about the commuter student, we might want to consider thinking about the institution itself.
After all, when we’re framing commuter student experiences what we’re really doing is talking about how they fit in with the institutional structures that frame their university life.
For one of the commuters I spent time with, delays to their journey were frequent even when allowing plenty of time for their journey. What is of interest though was what happened next.
One of their class tutors routinely employed the institutions’ academic attendance policy. The policy stated that if a student arrived later than 15 minutes after the class had started, they’d be marked as absent. This meant that a couple of times, whilst they’d informed this staff member via email in advance that they’d be late and did physically make it to their class, they were still marked absent because they arrived 15 minutes late.
In contrast another tutor, acknowledging that this student had emailed them warning of their late attendance, allowed them to sign the register when they arrived.
Institutions can have one attendance policy but have staff enact it in different ways. If you’re a commuter student who’s had an awful journey to get to class, it’s not ideal when you’re not sure how your class tutor might respond.
This particular student had been previously recommended by their tutor that they should factor more time into their journey to arrive on time. This student, along with many others in my study, were already factoring in extra time in their journeys.
You can also see why there might be some disgruntlement between students here. If you’ve done the same journey as someone else on your course who has a different module tutor, you’d be annoyed to find out that they let them sign the register yet your tutor marked you as absent. Experiences like these then can lead to differing expectations between students and the institution which could develop into some pretty bad feeling.
Great expectations
I suggest it’s a question here around what the institution deems a reasonable expectation of its students, and by extension whether or not the institutional structures are suitably flexible enough to accommodate any fluctuations within these.
If the above example here is anything to go by, it’s likely that what’s considered as a reasonable expectation of commuter students will differ between students, institutional policies and ultimately the staff that enact them.
Where students spoke to me about commuting to university in more positive terms, it was often relating to how their expectations of university had matched their reality. This could be down to the individual themselves. For example, where students had researched their commute or done a commute to work prior to starting their degree they took things like disruptions to travel as simply part of life as a commuter student.
But if the expectations that were being asked of students had changed. For example, being taught by different academic staff with different stances on attendance, or these experiences were not clear between the institution and the student to begin with, this negative narrative could often arise as a result.
Being a commuter student is not mutually exclusive to having a poor student experience. But if we want to hear more about the positive experiences of commuter students, we need to think about why they’re positive and consider how our institutions can enhance these experiences further.
This blog is part of our series on commuter students. Click here to see the other articles in the series.
Following on from the above, it would make sense to see more of the civic engagement and advocacy from universities focus on local public transportation. By being able to have a dialogue, there could be better accountability for public transport systems with a propensity for cancellations or late-running services, but also changes to both systems that benefit the other. For example, data on late-running busses due to traffic and external measures outside the bus companies’ control could help universities to understand where it would be better to timetable lectures and seminars in the day for courses that with heavy commuter populations. Or the university could share data (anonymised ofc) on where pockets of commuter students are living and where bus services could be increased, routes could be redirected, etc. in order to make sure students have a clear link to the universities. There are a lot of unexplored avenues for improving commuter experiences once we all sit up and accept that commuters are a good proportion of our student communities. And it will have a positive knock-on effect – improving public transport links directly to universities for students will likely encourage more staff to use public transport and reduce car usage, helping universities with their green goals as well!
I work in a suburban university with a substantial proportion of locally resident students. As a non-driving member of staff, before hybrid working, I had to endure the daily hell of an unpredictable commute on either a train and a bus, or two buses, which could be up to two hours each way. Public transport options to all our campuses are sketchy, unreliable, certainly don’t guarantee delivery to class on time even with additional time factored in, and dry up entirely in the evenings thus dissuading students or staff from lingering for events or socialising.
When universities make course offers to students, perhaps they could be more honest about the consequences of how the student wants to live or can live e.g. if you are local, how do you propose to get to university, and are you aware of the options? And be honest also about the parking restrictions (we have a major issue of students rogue parking in the local areas as they just have no other choice – particularly when timetabling into the evenings further limits their options).