CLOSER NEWS REPORT
A-levels are in full swing, with hundreds of thousands of students striving for the grades they need for university. But data from the Student Loans Company suggests there’s been a 28 per cent increase in students leaving after their first year. Closer investigates what’s behind it…
When Izzy Colwell started her first year at university in Exeter in September 2023, she was filled with anticipation for her new life away from home. But, just nine months on, now she’s planning to leave at the end of her first year.
There are many reasons behind her decision, not least the huge debt she’s racking up – if she stayed on, she estimates she’d leave owing a staggering £60,000. Izzy, 20, who lives in Dorset, explains, “I already owe nearly £15,000 between my maintenance grant and tuition fees, and I’ve been living in halls of residence so it’s cheaper than living out, which I’d have to do next year. I’ve spoken to second-year students whose rent is so expensive that they can’t afford heating and they have to ration baths. I’ve got a part-time minimum wage job to try to keep the debt down, but it’s exhausting.”
EXPERIENCE
Izzy thinks she would have coped with the financial aspect if she was really loving all the other parts of her university experience. But she says, “I don’t enjoy my politics degree and I don’t want to work in that field, so it all seems pointless. I think if I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, where you need a degree, I would have stayed, but I don’t, so I feel I’m only there because it’s expected that people go to uni.”
Izzy admits that the social scene was something that she was looking forward to, but that hasn’t materialised either. She says, “I’ve made some good friends who I’ll miss, but I haven’t enjoyed the social scene as much as I thought I would – a lot of people don’t go out much, probably because they can’t afford to.
MENTAL HEALTH
“Equally, a lot of lectures go online so in some of the ones I’ve been to, the lecture hall has been virtually empty – with only about 20 people there when there would have been hundreds pre-Covid. It just isn’t the experience I was expecting. It was a really hard decision to leave but, at the end of the day, I’m unhappy. “I couldn’t see that it would improve and I’d just get further and further into debt and be more miserable and my mental health would suffer.”
New figures show there’s been a 28 per cent rise in students dropping out of university. The primary reason for this is poor mental health, with a quarter of students citing this as a cause, followed by eight per cent leaving for financial reasons – an increase from 3.5 per cent in 2022.
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