The United Kingdom’s ‘going away to university’ migration and its changing impact on local populations in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Against the background of strong growth in tertiary education globally, this paper documents the continued expansion of the United Kingdom’s higher education sector in the twenty-first century and examines the impact which the British tradition of ‘going away to university’ has been having on both the receiving and sending ends of this process. For each of the UK’s 379 local and unitary authorities, it compares the numbers of modal undergraduate age (19–21 year olds) with the number that would have been living there if the late school-age population (16–18 year olds) had merely aged in place. This approach is applied initially to 2019, with the findings then being compared with those for 2001, revealing that this migration funnels school leavers into a relatively small number of university cities and towns containing up to four times as many 19–21s as 16–18s, while siphoning off over 30% of school leavers from some of the main recruiting grounds–a pattern that has intensified since 2001. This raises questions about the future scale and nature of this process and its implications for local economies, given the current questioning of role of higher education in the UK and developments such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.