Reversing the regional brain drain will take more than good jobs
High quality, affordable, rental accommodation is needed to break this cycle
4 minutes to read
Graduate retention is an extremely important, but often complex, issue.
A range of economic, social, geographical and employment factors all contribute to whether or not graduates decide to live and work in their university towns post-study. As a result, retention rates vary greatly from city to city across the UK. However, given the huge myriad of benefits university leavers can bring to local economies, as well as their propensity to drive economic growth, retaining this highly-valuable, well-educated and readily-available workforce should be a top priority for all regional university cities and towns.
Students moving from one location to another before and after their studies makes up a large share of domestic migration in the UK. London has historically been a net exporter of students, whilst large regional cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham are net importers. However, this trend typically reverses upon graduation.
Indeed, we often hear of regional towns and cities experiencing a brain drain of graduates to London. The capital acts as a magnet for recent university leavers looking for graduate jobs – partly thanks to the large number of graduate employment schemes available in the capital. At 70%, London has by far the highest graduate retention rate of any location in the UK.
There are many brilliant initiatives already in place across the rest of the country to help drive regional graduate retention – however often these are predominantly employment-focused. While access to good jobs is a key driver for graduates, there are other critical factors at play too.
One of the most important – and sometimes overlooked – of these factors is adequate housing provision. Students are no longer looking at university courses in isolation – it is also about the city context for that study and the type, quality and availability of housing. The same is true for graduates when they are deciding where to work – while employment is, of course, a factor, the wider social opportunities and living standards are also at play.
Knight Frank’s Student Accommodation Survey 2020, which canvasses the views of more than 70,000 students, indicated that nearly half (47%) of students planned to move directly into a property in the private rented sector following graduation.
In London that equates to a rolling demand of around 50,000 graduates looking for accommodation in each graduation year. In regional university cities the numbers are less but still significant – approximately 10,000 in Birmingham, around 6,000 in both Liverpool and Leeds, 5,300 in Bristol, almost 8,000 in Manchester, and over 10,000 in Edinburgh.
Affordability pressures mean that graduates are often sharing the cost of renting in house shares with other graduates and young professionals in increasing numbers across the board. This can lead to issues of excessive strain on housing stock, and often forces graduates into sub-standard accommodation – something which the PBSA sector is looking to address.
After experiencing the benefits of living in professionally managed, service-oriented accommodation that PBSA offers, graduates are now keen to replicate this experience post-study – if only it was more readily available.
Each generation of students is demanding more from their accommodation, and preferences are becoming ever more sophisticated. Second and third year retention in PBSA is also increasing; for example, 78% of returners currently living in PBSA would recommend it to first years.
For most, it is at graduation where their journey in high-quality and purpose-designed rental accommodation ends. However, with the right design, we can extend this trajectory post-study with the delivery of additional and more diverse Build to Rent accommodation. Co-Living is a crucial component of this – given the affordability that this sector can offer.
By providing both the high-quality accommodation that graduates have become accustomed to, along with the right job opportunities, a city will fulfil two of the key the requirements graduates have for remaining in their university cities.
Split between the main university cities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Southampton were almost 65,000 graduates considering remaining post-study in 2020. This considerable pool is going to be replenished at the end of the 2021 academic year – and every year thereafter. Residential investors and developers have a unique and significant opportunity to access this pool of would-be co-living and BTR renters.
There is a huge untapped opportunity to ramp up the delivery of co-living and BTR accommodation across the UK. If designed and delivered properly, this could be the key to permanently unlocking graduate retention – especially in the North, where university leavers will play a hugely important role in the government’s ongoing levelling-up agenda.
This blog was originally published on ReactNews
Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash