The impact of paid and unpaid work and of student debt on experience of higher education

Futuretrack is a longitudinal survey exploring the relationship between higher education, employment and career planning. Funded by the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU) and led by a team of researchers at the Warwick Institute for Employment Research, Futuretrack is tracking the cohort of students who applied to university through UCAS in 2005/06. Students will be surveyed four times over five years. The project explores why students decide to apply to higher education, how they choose their institution and course, and why they think higher education is a good investment. It also examines their attitudes to money, university careers services, extracurricular activities and unpaid work, and explores graduates' post-university experience of employment. In this paper we cover two important themes that have become central to [higher education] HE policy and practice: the growth of student employment, particularly during term, and the extent to which debt and anticipation of debt affect the experience of HE and the choices and aspirations that final year students had as they approached the transition to the next stage of their careers. Changes in funding arrangements for UK students shifted responsibility for HE investment from government to individual learners and their families, in particular, the introduction of variable tuition fees and repayable student loans for those who were deemed to be able to afford to contribute to the cost of their HE. There are means tested grants to enable students from lower, under-represented socio-economic backgrounds to enter HE, based on the assumption that previously excluded members of the population would be enabled to gain the long-term benefits of HE without being hampered by the burden of debt after graduation, but eligibility for these grants is relatively low and the amounts involved only cover basic costs incurred. Access to funding proved to play a role in determining whether students took paid employment during their courses and whether they had time for other activities. Most analysts have concluded that the increased financial pressure and higher levels of debt, particularly since the changes in HE funding arrangements introduced at the beginning of the 1990s have fostered an increase in students taking on paid work in parallel with their course-work during term (Humphrey, 2006; Callender and Wilkinson, 2003; Metcalf, 2003).

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