If you know a young person contemplating higher education this autumn, chances are you’ve had more conversations about money than about learning.
Fees (in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland) weigh heavy on the minds of applicants – but living costs (not least the ever-growing proportions of available funds devoted to rent) are also an immediate concern.
This has been the case for a good few years now – but given the conflation of Covid impacts and the cost of living crisis it makes sense to take the temperature now to see how the class of 2023 are reacting.
Longitudinal studies have been a feature of research around attitudes for higher learning for a while now – and today’s new research from the Sutton Trust is the first major publication I know of to make use of data from wave two of the Covid-19 Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) study. The first wave of COSMO spoke to over 13,000 young people across England just before they took GCSEs and equivalents in 2021 – wave two went back to this same group in 2022 as their final year of A level courses commenced.
