As you might expect, I’ve spent Labour conference here in Liverpool looking for students.
Collect the reports, polling, and pamphlets launched around a conference fringe and you end up with a fairly good picture of how the policy world thinks about any given group of people.
What a region with growth ambitions needs from students isn’t very complicated. It needs to get them there, keep enough of them once they’ve graduated, and remember in between that they live there – renting, commuting, working shifts, registering with GPs, and voting like everyone else.
Across the fringe, students turned up in three ways – where you’d expect them, missing from where you wouldn’t, and in a couple of cases counted in places they don’t seem to be.
HEPI’s Soft-Power Index is the “get them” argument. The US has educated 66 serving world leaders and the UK 60, and HEPI warns that international students will be “hammered” by the levy, while also taking aim at the compliance crackdown and the cut to the Graduate Route.
Equi held both halves of the migration argument at once, describing student visas as “the largest driver of net migration since 2020” while concluding that higher education would be “unlikely to sustain itself without migrants”.
The University of York’s work with QS and Public First made a regional case. Yorkshire and the Humber’s graduate supply is falling, engineering is about 2,160 graduates a year short, and international enrolments fell by 16 per cent in a single year.
The Creative Education Coalition wanted Lifelong Learning Entitlement funding for creative modules and for creative study at Level 7, maintenance grants for creative subjects, a longer Graduate visa, and a return to Erasmus+ – a list that covers getting students in, keeping them, and sending some of them out and back again.
Public First’s Scaling OxCam described the retention problem at the top end. Oxford takes 20 per cent equity stakes in its spinouts, and two-thirds of the billion-dollar start-ups founded by Oxbridge alumni are based elsewhere – graduates, and the firms they go on to found, don’t necessarily stay where they learned.
The Fabian Society blamed “the increasing cost of university” for rising interest in apprenticeships, and would restrict apprenticeship levy funds to people without a degree.
ThinkLabour and the British Foreign Policy Group would cut volunteers’ student loans for each year they serve in a National Resilience Corps – a citizenship argument with a repayment discount carrot, although the civic contribution only counts once the degree is over.
And the Institute for Government found that 74 per cent of people without degrees have little or no trust in the government, against 55 per cent of graduates. The civic dividend of a degree shows up in the data, even if most graduates aren’t exactly brimming with confidence either.
Put all that together and students appear as an input to be recruited, and graduates to be retained. What has rarely featured is the years in between.
The Right to Food Commission left students off its list of the groups most at risk of food insecurity – a gap that ought to frustrate universities and SUs that have spent the past four years running a food bank or building a basic needs agenda.
The Children’s Society found that 16 to 19-year-olds have the highest abuse rates, but said nothing about starting university, or about OfS’ condition of registration on harassment and sexual misconduct that now covers the place half of them go next.
The Health Foundation wanted mental health support for young people extended to colleges and other post-16 settings, but stopped short of universities. Liberty and More in Common’s work on free speech had nothing on campuses, the Tony Blair Institute’s case for rejoining the EU had nothing on Erasmus+, the youth experience scheme, or EU students’ fees, and the TaxPayers’ Alliance compared today’s debt with 1976 without mentioning student loans, which didn’t exist then and now make up a loan book running to hundreds of billions of pounds.
Young people did turn up as people – eating, staying safe, getting help, speaking, and being governed – but each time, the ones who happen to be enrolled at a university dropped out of view. It’s that silo thing again – students are assumed to be somebody else’s brief, so anyone writing about food, abuse, or health can leave them to universities, OfS, or DfE.
As ever, becoming a student seems to suspend someone’s membership of every other group they belong to.
Meanwhile the QS report counted 9,540 Leeds Trinity students as part of Yorkshire’s “graduate supply”. But whoever wrote it was reading HESA figures that don’t break out franchising – and a big wedge of those students are taught by partners in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, and Northampton.
Its figures for Hull also included 970 students taught by CEG, which runs the University of Hull London campus. The model then assumed 70 per cent of all of them would stay in Yorkshire after graduating – unlikely for someone who’s just finished a business course in Brentford.
I’ve done a lot of traipsing, and the overall sense is of a policy world that’s quite good at thinking about students as supply – people to be attracted, counted, and retained – and much less good at thinking about them as people while they’re there.
That matters most for regions. A place that wants its students to stay is more likely to manage it if it treated them as part of the place while they were studying – fed, housed, safe, and listened to – rather than as a pipeline that only switches on at graduation.
And if the pipeline turns out to include several thousand people studying business in Brentford, it might be worth checking where it actually runs before building a regional growth plan around it.