Abandoned pint glasses, overgrown gardens, heavily curtained windows and loud kerfuffles at the crack of dawn.

If housing minister Caroline Flint has her way, these hallmarks of undergraduate living could soon vanish to restore suburban order to student-saturated streets.


In some areas, students outnumber local residents. Belfast’s Queen’s University students inhabit more than half of houses in the immediate vicinity of the campus while around two-thirds of the 10,000 residents of Headingley, in Leeds, are students, all packed into 73 streets of terraced houses.

Town-gown relations are notoriously tense during term time in cities such as Leeds, Nottingham and Southampton.

The government’s plan is to halt the “studentification” of university towns by capping the number of houses in multiple occupation (HMO).

Flint wants councils to get together with universities to plan more purpose-built accommodation. She says her main concern is communities left as “ghost towns” when students desert them during the summer months.

But let’s not forget why these ghettos sprung up in the first place.

Thanks in part to the government’s ambitious target to get 50% of young people into higher education, the UK’s student population has swelled to 2.5 million.

Couple this with an average student debt of £17, 500 and you can’t blame students – and landlords for that matter – for searching out the cheapest, most convenient housing, however overcrowded or antisocial this may be for their neighbours.

Flint’s drive to “blend student populations into well-mixed neighbourhoods” seems a seriously delayed reaction to a problem that has been building up for years. And announcing her plans in the middle of a dip in the housing market is unlikely to get landlords on board with changes in legislation.

A spokesman for the housing charity Shelter said: “This seems to be a cheap dig at students, many of whom are forced to live in HMOs because it’s the only way they can afford to attend university.

“Students are often some of the most exploited people in the private rented sector, having to live in poor but expensive accommodation because it’s located near the college or university.

“If the government really wants to tackle the issue, it should be looking at the sector as a whole and not just blame students.”

And Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, fears that “added bureaucracy will discourage landlords from the HMO market”.

The truth is that universities and clusters of their students bring in a substantial income to many towns and cities.

According to Universities UK, higher education institutions generate £45m each year, and for every 100 university employees, a further 99 jobs are created in the wider economy as a knock-on effect.

So, in theory, top marks to Flint for recognising that many UK university towns are swamped with students.

In practice though, with so many millions of young people in full-time higher education, the ghost-town problem is unlikely to disappear.

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Higher education in Britain is on the verge of a revolution – no, several revolutions. The pressures fueling these revolutions are many. By general agreement, the sector is grossly underfunded. In these very cash-limited times, it is unlikely this funding gap will be bridged by the taxpayer or employers. The money will have to come from students.

Next year, there will be a critical debate on whether to raise the cap on top-up university tuition fees in England, currently £3,000 per annum. David Eastwood, the outgoing chief executive of the English Funding Council, recently hypothesized that, given the economic recession, politicians may not wish to raise the cap at all. But this will only make an already dire funding situation even worse. Currently, we tolerate a situation in which working-class taxpayers subsidize middle-class students. This is indefensible. And if the Treasury finds some genuine extra money for education, it must surely go into the primary and secondary sectors.

The cap must be raised. But by how much? A straw poll I conducted among colleagues in British higher education this year suggests that the sector is looking to a figure of around £6,000 per annum. If the cap were abolished, I believe the going rate would in any case coalesce around this sum. This would increase the average cost of a bachelor’s degree to £18,000. Students, who are already beginning to think seriously about the value of the first degree in terms of the extra earning power that it might or might not provide that will be bound to think harder still.

There are a number of steps the sector and the government could take to ease the financial burden. The first would be to move rapidly to a standard two-year bachelor’s programme. Most bachelor’s programmes could easily be reconfigured in this way, without any loss of content or lowering of standards, by teaching during the long summer vacations. This does not mean that academic staff – who need time away from teaching for scholarship and research – would teach all year round, but that the teaching would be delivered more flexibly, over a four-term or three-semester academic year.

Whether the tuition cap is abolished altogether or merely raised, there will need to be a fundamental reform of the way in which students can access financial support. As Mike Baker pointed out in these pages last week, the distinction between full-time and part-time students is nowadays largely fictional. Part-timers are very badly served indeed by current funding support policies. They need to have exactly the same access to grants and loans as full-timers. And all UK students should be able to claim some tax relief on the fees they pay, and on the debts they incur.

But why “go” to university to obtain a degree? A number of private companies are hoping to acquire taught-degree awarding powers. When they do so, it will be possible to move straight from secondary school to a company-based apprenticeship, picking up a degree on the way – and being paid to do so. Indeed, we are practically at this point already. At Flybe, for example, engineers and cabin crew can, as they successfully complete their in-house training, receive certificates calibrated at various levels right through to level 4 of the QCA’s qualifications and credit framework, which is equivalent to a university degree. Further education colleges can now apply for foundation degree awarding powers, and some (especially the large “mixed-economy” colleges that already teach HE as well as FE courses) will surely acquire the coveted “university” title before too long.

I am not one of those who think that “more” necessarily means “worse”. It doesn’t. But as these revolutions gather pace, we need to move away from the one-size-fits-all approach to the qualifications that universities award. The idea that a bachelor’s degree from a “modern” former college of higher education is – and must be – of the same standard as one from a Russell Group research university is daft, and does a disservice to both types of institution. Once we break with the illusion of a single “gold” standard in a mass HE system, some – though not all – of the problems associated with the assurance of academic standards will disappear.

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