Bridget, Liz and Steve need to go for a coffee

But last week at Universities UK Conference, now former Science Secretary Peter Kyle was arguing that too many universities are competing for the same pool of students:

One of the problems is that too many universities are competing for the same pool of students at the expense of playing to their relative strengths or truly specialising to become the go-to authority in their field rather than a bit player in many.

He was partly making a point about student demand – noting a rise in students wanting to study science or technology courses, he said that a university cutting some of its arts courses, but compensating that with increased investment into an area in demand like space research, is “not necessarily a bad thing”.

Fewer universities playing to fewer strengths is something we’ve heard before from neck of the woods. At her committee valedictory in June, outgoing UKRI CEO Ottoline Leyser suggested consolidation in the sector should be more coordinated and that universities could “focus on a smaller range of topics”.

Notwithstanding central government’s aversion to even nudging towards what it might want students to study in anything approaching a plan, having fewer universities doing less things each only works if you maintain – or even increase – the proportion of students prepared to study away from home.

The problem is that that depends on a student accommodation market that works. And it’s increasingly clear that we have the opposite.

In student housing charity Unipol’s House Hunting Behaviour Survey – which came out on Friday – three-quarters of the 2,600 students surveyed cited affordability as their primary concern when house hunting, with almost two-thirds encountering affordability problems.

Students are having to find an average of £36 per week more than they can afford, with 71 per cent forced to revise their budgets upward mid-search. Even with students working an average of 15 hours per week and receiving parental contributions averaging £506 per month, they’re still falling short of the minimum income standards researchers say they need.

The supply side of the market is equally problematic. A quarter of students reported severe accommodation shortages, with the situation particularly acute in cities like Bristol, York and Oxford. Unipol reckons that traditional student housing stock – Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs) – that has long provided affordable options is under threat from the incoming Renters’ Rights Bill (finalising its run in Parliament this week), which risks driving more landlords out of the student market entirely.

Meanwhile, Purpose-Built Student Accommodation, while growing, remains expensive and primarily targeted at first-year students rather than the returning students who make up the bulk of those seeking housing.

The pressures are forcing students into compromises that undermine the mobility Kyle’s university specialisation assumptions depend on.

More than half of students seeking accommodation reported that their housing search began “far too early” – often in October and November when they’d barely settled into university life. Over a fifth of survey respondents expect to commute more than 30 minutes to university, with half of these doing so purely to find cheaper rent. Many are being forced to abandon the idea of studying away from home altogether, with affordability cited as the main reason students consider returning to live with their parents.

Elsewhere in the survey there’s a couple of phenomena worth noting. The sector tends to assume two simplistic models for student living – the student living away from home in halls or an HMO near to campus, and the commuter student who’s able to draw on family and friend resources given they’ve not left home. But both are starting to look faulty.

Of the 549 students expecting to commute more than 30 minutes to university, 467 were actually still looking for accommodation, meaning they’re living independently but far from campus. Only 8 per cent of this commuting cohort were actually living at home.

Half chose to live far away specifically to find cheaper rents, while another 22 per cent couldn’t find any available property closer than 30 minutes away. These aren’t traditional commuters in the sense the sector understand them – they’re displaced students forced into long journeys by housing market failure.

There’s also an emerging trend of students who lived in halls initially but then move home, with affordability the primary driver. Students in their third year or beyond were most likely to have had to adjust their rent expectations upward during their search, suggesting the financial pressures that might drive this retreat intensify over time.

Hybrid models of student residence challenge traditional support structures, pastoral care systems, and assumptions about campus engagement. A student living an hour away in cheap accommodation isn’t accessing the same university experience as either a traditional hall resident or a home-based commuter with family support nearby.

If students can’t afford to study away from home, or are increasingly constrained to institutions within commuting distance, then the kind of specialisation and consolidation that Kyle and others advocate becomes far harder to achieve. A university that decides to become the “go-to authority” in space research rather than maintaining a broad curriculum only works if students from across the country can actually afford to live there to study it.

Without a functioning accommodation market, we risk not just limiting student choice, but creating a more stratified system where your family’s financial resources determine not just whether you can go to university and universities you can realistically consider, but also which subjects you can study.

Back in July, Kyle said that he was “working closely” with Bridget Phillipson on the post-16 education and skills white paper. Is it too much to ask that his successor Liz Kendall gets new Housing Secretary Steve Reed involved in the conversation as well?