One potential misreading of there being more “commuter students” in higher education is the idea that they’re all studying significantly more locally than they would have before.
The categorisations of “residential”/away from homers and “commuter”/at homers as a binary is deep in UK higher education culture, and reflected in the available home domiciled student finance categories – but it’s becoming clear that more things are going on than just some “choosing local”.
There isn’t fantastic data on this. There’s housing type, which we looked at here, SLC data on who takes out an “at home” or an “away from home” loan, and UCAS often says that there are signals of a more local focus.
What we can see via HESA is which region a student is from, and which region a student is studying in. That tells us that for full-time students from the UK studying in the UK, in 2017-18 there were 52.51% studying in the same region as their domicile – down to 50.85% in 2021-22. Hardly earth shattering.
