Last summer, when we originally crowdsourced and published 101 ways to get the cost of living down for students, it rapidly became one of the most read articles on the site of all time.
That was heartening – and optimistically overestimating our influence, I assumed that universities would instigate working groups, tsars and taskforces to work on both short-term and long solutions to what is obviously going to be a long and hard period of student poverty.
There are a handful that have done that – extending their efforts beyond the fixes announced last autumn into impressive programmes of work aimed at reducing participation costs and monitoring and analysing the differential impacts of the crisis on different types of student.
But in a lot of cases those meetings have fallen out of the diary, the efficacy research is absent, and whatever quick fixes were put in place last time (often because everyone else had announced a quick fix and it started to look bad not to have one) have been reduced or reheated in one of the campus microwaves that were hastily installed.
