Dr Susan Kenyon reflects on the recent  Wonkhe commuter student series and asks how can we make universities more inclusive for commuter students.

The student population has changed, not just here, at Canterbury Christ Church University, but nationally, too, right across higher education in the UK. 

For one thing, it is much bigger than it used to be – more than half of young people in the UK today will participate in higher education. 

At the same time, our student population has become much more diverse.   

How should the HE sector respond to this? 

Should we be trying to include students in our current, exclusive universities, trying to bring them in by reshaping them, so that they fit in? 

Or should we be trying to reshape our universities, creating an inclusive university, not just one that is less exclusive? 

These questions are at the forefront of my mind, as I reflect on the recent Wonkhe commuter students series, which I co-curated, with Mack Marshall, and on the discussions that I have been privileged to have at universities across the UK, at a number of conferences recently. 

I feel that the more that I talk with and about commuter students, in the course of my research, the more I wonder, what exactly is it that we are trying to achieve?  What does inclusion look like, for commuter students? 

Or, to put it another way, what do we want our students to feel that they belong to? 

I’ve become a little bit worried that we may be asking our students to belong to a system that they can’t belong to, unless they fundamentally change. 

Asking them to change reinforces the idea that they don’t matter.  And this is something that I hear a lot, in interviews and focus groups. 

I’m worried that we might not be making things better, by focusing on including people in a type of student experience, or a way of living and learning, that is shaped around an identity that they cannot, or do not want to, reshape themselves in to. 

I wonder if we might be able to do more to enable student success, if we think a little bit differently, un-learning what we think a student is and un-learning what we think a university ‘should’ be, showing our students that they matter by adapting to them, rather than trying to help them to adapt to us. 

More fundamentally, I’m concerned that we are trying to enable students to belong in our system, when we need to think more about where we belong in their lives. 

For many commuter students, university isn’t the centre of their lives.  It’s just a part of their lives. 

Yet, in the main, we continue to provide HE as though it is the centre of their lives; and we are trying very hard to help them to fit into this, to help them to ‘belong’ as a ‘typical student’, to be part of what we see as a ‘normal student experience’, which we assume they want to belong to. 

I think that, when we are trying to tell our students that they matter, by trying to help them fit into a system that isn’t designed for them, we actually highlight their difference. 

I think that the key to student belonging and mattering lies in us ‘de-centring’ ‘being a student’ from our understanding of our students’ lives and reshaping our pedagogy, policy and processes around a recognition of where ‘being a student’ belongs and matters in our students’ lives. 

We can adapt, to bring them and their lived experiences into the centre of the university, shaping the university around the student.  If we can do this, we can help them to see that their whole lives matter and they belong. 

If we challenge the idea of helping our students to adapt to us, focusing more on how we can adapt what we do and, more fundamentally, who we think a ‘typical student’ is, we can gradually shift the culture around ‘being a student’, gradually shaping higher education for the students who are in front of us, not the students who used to be in front of us, or who we were, when we were students. 

This is the key to an inclusive, sustainable higher education sector. 

Dr Susan Kenyon is Principal Lecturer in Politics.