Is higher education producing long-term sick graduates?

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall says that “spiralling inactivity” is the “greatest employment challenge for a generation” – and that reversing it is central to Labour’s plans to boost economic growth.

And students, said the story, are one of the biggest contributors to rising economic inactivity – with deteriorating mental health a key factor.

If you cling to the idea that higher education participation tends to make you healthier, this is bad news. If you’re trying to highlight the impact of poor mental health provision for students, this is helpful to know.

And either way, it has generated comments like these:

Interesting they’re capable of studying and obtaining degrees upon completion of college become so ill the only option is to apply for long term sickness benefits.

The “illness” will quickly disappear if the free money is removed.

What a surprise. Tell children that men can be women and weaponise gender ideology, then tell them they have a human right never to be offended, guess what happens?

Raise a generation who believe in no platform for hurty speakers, read Harry Potter, consider feelings trump facts, are terrified of the weather, live off the bank of mum & dad and quelle surprise they struggle to cope with the harsh reality of life.

For those raised in a fairy dairy land of pronouns and rainbows, rolling out of bed and clocking on as an office drone overwhelms their precious sensibilities. So back under the duvet they crawl while we pay benefit money so they can buy soup to throw at art. Because the beauty of a Van Gogh is secondary to their feet stomping infantilised world.

Be interesting to know which courses they’ve come from. Sounds like depression upon the realisation that they come out with massive debt, can’t get a job & just wasted 4 years.

The problem? It’s not really true.

The key para in the piece says that analysis by the Boston Consulting Group of people’s routes into long-term sickness found that students were now one of the biggest “contributors”:

In 2021-22, 63,392 people went straight from being economically inactive because they were studying to being inactive through long-term sickness, up from 36,866 in 2019-20. Once people flowing the other way are subtracted, students pushed up inactivity numbers by 42,300 net, up from 12,700 in 2019-20.

It’s not a finding that you can even find in the report – but as I say, it’s one that has found its way into any number of other outlets’ coverage on the report from the NHS Confederation and the Boston Consulting Group.

To get a source on the data we asked BCG directly – and they told us that the number of those aged 16-24 who are long term sick inactive with multiple conditions has grown by 18 per cent since pre-Covid, making them the fastest growing group of those out of the workforce – “largely driven” by an acceleration of mental health conditions post Covid.

It also said that it’s “no coincidence” that the numbers of those moving directly from being students to being economically inactive has grown rapidly – these flows have more than tripled since pre-Covid:

Not only is this meant to be the healthiest section of the population but those who spend a prolonged period out of work at the start of their career have been shown to have materially lower income and productivity for the rest of their lives.

To illustrate, they gave us the following table – which shows a mixture of inflows and outflows from students to being economically inactive. The figures show the average annual growth rate in net flows into long term sick inactive over the seven year period:

The figure for students shows that, on average over the past seven years, the number of students moving to long-term sick inactive from being students has risen by 5.5 per year. Of course, this has not been linear, it declined pre covid and then has risen quickly post covid, but the CAGR rates just give a quick indication of how flows into long term sick inactive have changed over the past seven years.

The problem is that they’ve not dealt with the definitions issue. Here “students” include people leaving school or at age 18 directly, whether or not they go to university.

So, what this may well actually show is a rise in health conditions (mental and physical) identified within school or college – where more leavers are immediately registered as economically inactive (long term sick) rather than economically inactive (unemployed).

If someone’s long-term sick at 17, they are likely still in full-time education and never labelled as such – they’re in the stats as economically inactive (student). If they go into university, they’re labelled as economically inactive (student) too. So we have literally no idea if university makes them better or worse.

This is what happens when you try to use labour market statistics to illustrate health problems – “students” includes all sorts of ages and education, while NHS stats rarely identify whether age categories are in full-time education or not.

That’s not to say that students should be treated as some special case. But when society and the government’s expectations – especially around mental health – tend to fall on vice chancellors rather than NHS trust bosses, it becomes especially important that we know what the state of student health is, and whether it’s getting better or worse, and for who.

That countries like Finland sustain a dedicated student health survey to establish just that is inspiring – that the DfE (not DoH) owned Higher education mental health implementation taskforce appears to have established no baseline set of stats at all on the (mental) health of the students it’s seeking to support is miserable.

We desperately need better data on students and health. This isn’t it.