Digs Welcomes International Students

The Association for Student Residential Accommodation (ASRA) held their annual conference from Sunday April 1st until April 4th, but they are certainly no fool. Set up to support and promotion of our sector and allow us to network, consult with industry professionals and develop our market, together.

This year the SSAM team attended as exhibitors, flying the flag for the DIGS experience and what South Street offers to clients and students as a whole. The underlying theme of the conference was ‘It’s All About The Experience”, about making the industry much more than just accommodation but a lifestyle choice for students.

As our main ethos has always been to instill a sense of community, a home from home, for all our residents to feel part of something made this theme seem like it was almost tailored to fit us perfectly.

We attended with one main aim, to widen SSAM’s horizons and to shout loud and clear about the waves we’ve been making. We discussed with delegates the powers we’ve discovered in social media, the success we’ve had nurturing our community, our ‘green’ philosophy and how we’ve made all this a benefit to our investors.

A whole host of our partners were also in attendance, including Occam Systems, ASK4, Keycom and Endsleigh Insurance giving us the chance to all be in the same place at the same time and vouching for our blossoming industry together.

Of course no exhibition could be without a social aspect and ASRA 12 put on some fantastic events for all the delegates and exhibitors to enjoy whilst sharing their stories and experiences. Treated to a night with a performance from The Coultures, comedian Sean Walsh, an evening trip to Coventry Cathedral, a wonderful night out at a museum with dinner and finally, a spectacular gala night with a masquerade ball. A perfect end to a very informative, opportunity filled few days!

Thanks go to Warwick University where ASRA 12 was held, a lovely campus, welcoming and well equipped.

We must also say congratulations to Deborah Carter from the University of Coventry who won our competition to bag themselves an iPad – Enjoy!

Many thanks to ASRA 12 and we look forward to the next one!

As part of our commitment to being a green business, we recently went to “zero landfill” at our Huddersfield and Sheffield sites. Now, almost every ounce of rubbish that students produce is recycled. Obviously, this is a good marketing ploy. Today’s students are increasingly making consumer choices based on ethics and sustainability practices: whether the jeans they wear have been made with child labour; whether their make-up has been tested on animals; whether the farmers who grew their coffee or tea were paid a fair wage. So by being an accommodation provider that actively promotes green living, we can differentiate ourselves from other less ethically inclined providers.

Of course, we can’t just expect students to behave in green ways – we also need to give them the tools to do it. So in every flat’s kitchen, we’ve given students two bins: one for general waste, and one for recycling. Then in the bin stores, we’ve put three types of bins for students to sort their waste. We’ve also used our student-facing website DIGS to explain how the system works and what students need to do. And we’ve trained all our reception staff on how to help students do the right thing.

On top of that, students need a good reason to help us with our zero landfill targets. This is one of those rare instances where what works financially for students also works for investors. That’s because it’s actually cheaper for us to recycle all our rubbish than it is to send it to landfill. As a result, our refuse collection bill is plummeting. That has a direct impact on our accommodation costs for students. And it keeps our operational costs down, which means a healthier bottom line and stronger returns for investors. Lower accommodation costs also give us a competitive advantage. So being green isn’t just a marketing stunt – it’s helping us cut costs, maintain high occupancy rates, and turn a bigger profit. Proof then, that businesses don’t have to choose between being making money and behaving in an ethical way.

By now, we’re all totally familiar with the debate about tuition fee rises. On one side, student groups argue it will have a detrimental impact on student numbers and university life. And on the other, the government is trying to convince the public that it will make universities more flexible, efficient and responsive. It’s far too soon to know who’s right. But there’s little doubt that the issue is already changing the shape of higher learning in Britain.

One of the clearest examples of this is that more and more students seem to be taking the “sensible” option – choosing degrees that have clearer professional paths than the murkier professional journeys promised by non-vocational qualifications. Predictably, applications for medicine, law and medicine are on the up, while the arts and humanities are down 14.6%. Weirdly, there has also been a big drop in students taking non-European languages – strange given the huge growth in Asia’s economic and political power.

Students are also starting to opt for two-year degrees, forgoing their traditional summer breaks to get through their courses more quickly. And with fees at £9,000 per year, who can blame them? Demand is also soaring for places in public/private partnerships: programmes in which a company pays a student through university in exchange for work – either while the student is studying, or for a minimum contract period after they graduate. The Open University and night courses are seeing numbers surge too. Once the exclusive domain of amateur enthusiasts and retired boffins, they’re now being seen as viable ways to increase professional skills without having the career disruption of a traditional residency-based degree.

On the face of things, all of this sounds like good news for the government and students: faster qualifications, less student debt, more flexible ways to up-skill. But there are long-term issues too. For example, a huge proportion of successful people end up in industries that have nothing to do with their degrees: the hedge fund manager who studied ancient Greek, the FTSE 100 CEO who studied political science, the TV producer who studied painting. So in being so vocationally focused, will we lose our most lateral and creative thinkers? And when it comes to shorter degrees, it’s one thing to cram in content, but what about those learning skills that are developed over a longer period? Of course, the effects of such issues are often difficult to prove. But they do at least show that the questions raised by the huge shake-ups in the university sector are more than just economic – they’re cultural too.

Fast Tube by Casper

Fast Tube by Casper

Every time we think the great tuition fees debate has run out of steam, a new issue springs up. And the latest might just be the most important of all: confusion.

The Independent Taskforce on Student Finance Information recently conducted a survey in which they asked 2,000 adults about their understanding of next year’s tuition fees system. The results are alarming. Six in ten said they had little or no understanding of how the new system would work. 26% wrongly thought students would have to pay fees upfront. And more than half said that the rises made university a less attractive option.

The results seem to suggest that the Government has done a poor job of communicating the changes. So it’s just as well that MoneySavingExpert.com’s Martin Lewis is heading up the Independent Taskforce that carried out the survey. Lewis has built a career on demystifying personal finance. It’s clear that he feels passionately about his latest challenge: tackling the myths and misunderstandings about the costs of higher education. As he says: “if students don’t understand the true cost, how can they decide if it’s worth it?”

To help students, Lewis has written a Guide to the 2012 changes, which can be found here. His advice is a perfect example of the role the private sector can play in helping students get through university. This is something we feel strongly about too. Through our student-facing website DIGS, we were the first student accommodation provider to use social media to communicate directly with our customers. For a long time now, we’ve used blogs, Facebook and Twitter to help students with their financial management – everything from budgeting advice and economical cooking tips to helping them reduce their energy consumption.

It’s important to remember that for many students, university is their first time away from home. So we need to help them understand that studying is no longer just about getting a degree. It’s also about managing debt, and making sure that the short-term gains of their university years – which should be some of the most rewarding and exciting of their lives – aren’t damaging their long-term financial futures.

Last Wednesday, several thousand students marched through London in protest against tuition fee rises and what many of them see as the “privatisation” of UK universities. By now, we’re used to seeing students out on the streets. Indeed, we’ve blogged about protests before, and we’ve commented a lot on the rising ill feeling towards tuition fee rises. But the latest march had a different – and some would say tenser – character.

There were no repeats of last year’s scenes, when a small group of protesters smashed their way into Conservative Party Headquarters. But that may have been because according to some estimates there were more police on the streets this year than demonstrators. The Met had allocated 4,000 officers to control the demonstration – a massive operation. What’s more, those officers were authorised to use plastic bullets in extreme circumstances – a fact that came to light before the march took place. Police had also sent letters to last year’s protesters, which made clear what the consequences would be if they didn’t stick to the protest’s strict rules.

Estimates of student numbers vary drastically – from the police’s own 2,000 figure to the 15,000 suggested by the demonstration’s organisers. In the end, the real figure doesn’t matter much. More important is the fact that the police may actually have outnumbered students. This shows how nervous the Met and the Home Office are about the wave of demonstrations and riots they’ve had to deal with in the past twelve months.

At South Street, our job isn’t to question or analyse police tactics. But as a business that works directly with universities, we need to keep up with the collective student mood. And right now, that mood isn’t great. A big part of the problem is the gap between the government’s perceptions of tuition fee rises and what students on the ground think of them. For example, the government has titled its fees white paper “Students at the Heart of the System”. And yet the protests seem to suggest that students feel more disenfranchised than ever.

And while it might be easy to think that student protesters are only concerned about their future personal debt, the reality is far more complex. As Birmingham student Claire Lister told the Guardian: “The cuts within universities will affect women to the greatest degree. Humanities courses – which in general have a larger percentage of female students – are being targeted first for spending cuts.” Lister’s concerns are already becoming a reality at some institutions. London Metropolitan, for example, has apparently cut up to 70% of its undergraduate courses, with the arts and humanities most severely affected.

The reality is that there is no simple answer to tuition fees. The government needs to save money, and universities need revenue to keep operating. But perhaps the experiences and motivations of students are more complex than we’ve given them credit for too. Last week’s actions – from police and protesters alike – make it clear that this standoff isn’t going anywhere in a hurry, and will take some serious diplomacy to resolve.