The Effect of Students on University Towns: A Negative or Positive?

By Nigel Thrift, vice-chancellor of the University of Warwick, in England. Over the last couple of months in the northern hemisphere, students have been making their way to university in the hundreds of thousands. Cars full of possessions are driven up and down the major roads in a gigantic game of location swapping (there is a nice depiction of the process at Stanford at the end of the recent movie, “The Kids Are All Right”). We can often forget just how scary the event can be for first-time students. Their fears are nearly all about fitting in and they are no less real for being generally ill-founded.
The difficulties of dislocation are often compounded by their international dimension. Students have to negotiate cultural difference in ways which are often about no longer taking for granted the taken for granted but, again, they usually succeed in producing their own hybrid cultures which will not only get them by but can be remarkably constructive.
Whatever the case, what we can sometimes forget is that this mass migration also affects adjacent communities. What were quiet streets can become noisy as new student neighbors move in. It becomes difficult to park. In some places quite a bit of anti-student feeling can be generated by what has come to be called the process of “studentification” (as opposed to gentrification), a phenomenon which has become a significant force in many towns and cities with the growth of so many universities and other higher-education institutions. Certainly, turnover within student areas is sufficiently high that it can cause significant neighborhood and community disruption in many towns and cities. After all, research shows that students are usually highly concentrated residentially. Statistically the population of students tends to show a high degree of segregation from nonstudents. Research also shows that students often have quite distinct labor market characteristics born out of being highly concentrated within particular sectors and types of occupation. Students also have the potential to produce wider labor market impacts too, including competition with other local young people for jobs (see the recent special issue of “Environment and Planning A” on student geographies).
But what often seems to be forgotten in the general rush to blame students for things which are often not to do with them is the positive economic activity that students bring to a place. Warwick is illustrative. Local taxi drivers around the Warwick campus breathe a sigh of relief after the summer fare customer drought while the nearby local town of Leamington Spa finds its population increased by 10 percent with all of the positive economic multipliers you might expect for local traders and companies. Warwick is setting up a student study center there in acknowledgment of this fact.

Then there are all the positive social impacts too. Volunteering by students has real value to communities, whether it is in the form of legal advice or working in schools or environmental projects. Warwick, for example, has some 2,300 student volunteers working away at any one time, a fact of which I am very proud.
Finally, students have an energy and determination that adds so much to the general social atmosphere of places. Many places would find themselves much the poorer places to live without their liveliness.