The real cost of higher education: Glasgow, inequality, and the universities in our midst

This piece is a companion to "Higher Education Beyond 2030: Principles, pedagogy, and the people we keep leaving out," which makes the principled case for transformation drawing on the UNESCO roadmap.

I am a doctoral student and a university staff member working in higher education, and living in Glasgow. I attend sessions about the future of the sector, read the policy documents, and engage seriously with arguments about transformation, inclusion, and epistemic justice.

I also travel to and from two campuses in a city where average private rents rose by 6.1% in a single year, where Glasgow City Council declared a housing emergency in November 2023, and where, according to NUS Scotland's own survey data, over half of students in Scotland have skipped a meal because of a lack of money.

This piece is a companion to a reflection I wrote on the UNESCO roadmap Transforming Higher Education: Global Collaboration on Visioning and Action (UNESCO, 2026) and on a recent session I attended exploring its implications. That piece made the principled arguments about digital access, collaborative pedagogy, and decolonization. This one asks what those principles look like when set against the material conditions of a specific city and the people who live, study, and work in it.

The intended audience here is different from the companion piece. This is not primarily addressed to educational theorists or senior policymakers, though they are welcome. It is addressed to students who are wondering whether their institution is on their side. To staff who are navigating the same city with the same pressures and less institutional support than they deserve. To members of the public who live alongside Glasgow's universities and have a stake in what those universities do and how they do it. And to policymakers who need to hear, in plain terms, what the gap between rhetoric and reality currently looks like

The city these universities are in

Glasgow is home to three major universities and a School of Art, with a student population that has grown by more than 20,000 over the last decade (Urban Living News, 2025). It is also a city in a housing emergency. Glasgow City Council declared that emergency in November 2023 after councillors agreed that pressures on homelessness services had become impossible to manage without formal acknowledgment (Glasgow City Council, 2023). The Scottish Housing Regulator had warned in February 2023 of an emerging risk of systemic failure. By December 2023, it had concluded that a systemic crisis in homelessness services was underway across Scotland (Glasgow Guardian, 2026).

The numbers behind that emergency are visible in the data. According to the Office for National Statistics, average private rents in Greater Glasgow reached £1,273 per month in January 2026, a 6.1% annual increase that significantly outpaced the Scottish average rise of 2.6% over the same period (ONS, 2026). Average rents for a one-bedroom property stand at £838 per month; for a flat or maisonette, £1,010. Average house prices in Glasgow reached £189,000 in December 2025, up 4.8% year on year, with first-time buyers paying an average of £171,000 (ONS, 2026). These are not abstract figures. They describe the market that students, early-career researchers, sessional teaching staff, and professional services workers are trying to navigate on incomes that have not kept pace.

It is worth flagging a distinction here. The ONS rental figures reflect the broad private rental market across Greater Glasgow. Student shared accommodation, while cheaper on average, has followed the same upward trajectory. Estimates for shared student housing in Glasgow range from around £350 to £500 per month per person (UniNist, 2025), but these figures predate the most recent rent increases and should be understood as a floor rather than a reliable current average. A report by the Chartered Institute of Housing found a shortfall of over 6,000 student bed spaces in Glasgow alone (Property118, 2024), meaning that many students are competing for housing in the general private rental market rather than the more sheltered student sector.

When students cannot find affordable housing near campus, the consequences are not merely inconvenient. Reports showed students at one of Glasgow's major universities placed in emergency accommodation when they could not secure housing in time for the start of term. Others commuted long distances or sofa-surfed while attending lectures (Glasgow Guardian, 2026; UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, 2024). A survey found that 57% of students in Glasgow felt their university offered no support to address the cost of living crisis, placing Glasgow second among UK cities for perceived lack of university support (The Tab, 2023).

What the data says about daily survival

NUS Scotland's 2023 report Fighting for Students: The Cost of Survival, based on a survey of over 5,300 students and apprentices across Scotland conducted in November 2022, sets out what these conditions mean in practice (NUS Scotland, 2023). It is worth stating these figures plainly: 52% of students surveyed had skipped a meal due to lack of money; 45% had gone without heating; 35% had been unable to pay their rent in full at some point; 12% had experienced homelessness during their studies, with 2% homeless at the time of the survey; 11% had used a food bank; and over a third had considered dropping out for financial reasons, with the cost of living cited by one in five of those who had considered leaving.

Two thirds of students reported that their mental health had been affected by worrying about money. Three in five were working alongside their studies, many of them in part-time jobs of ten to twenty hours per week, taken on not for career development but to cover rent, food, and transport (NUS Scotland, 2023).

This data is now over three years old and was collected before the most recent rounds of rent increases reflected in the ONS figures cited above. The conditions it describes have in all probability worsened since. These figures are not a historical snapshot of a crisis that has passed. They are a baseline for a situation that has continued to deteriorate.

Widening access students, those from low-income backgrounds, care-experienced students, estranged students, disabled students, and students with caring responsibilities, were consistently more likely to appear at the sharp end of every one of these measures (NUS Scotland, 2023). These are the students who are most likely to have been the first in their families to enter higher education, who carry the highest stakes in being here, and who are being asked to succeed in an environment that is materially stacked against them in ways their more affluent peers simply do not experience.

The cost* of getting there

Regarding costs*, I have done an online search for local costs as of March 2026; some of these numbers may be incorrect, as, from personal observation, bus/subway/train prices can and do change at short notice.

The question of transport sits at a particular intersection of the city's inequalities and the choices universities make about how they deliver their teaching and events.

When students and staff are priced out of living near campus, they travel in from further away. When they travel in from further away, they pay more to get there. And when a university decides that a seminar, a meeting, a lecture, or a research event will be in-person only, which is increasingly common as institutions pull back from hybrid provision expanded during the pandemic, it is making a financial demand on people whose financial position it has not accounted for.

Scotland's under-22s free bus travel scheme is a genuinely important policy. Every person aged between 5 and 21 living in Scotland can travel on almost all scheduled bus services for free using a National Entitlement Card (Transport Scotland, 2024). For younger undergraduates, this is real and meaningful support. But the scheme has limits that matter enormously in a university context. It does not cover the subway. It does not cover trains. It applies to buses only, and it ends at 22. Most postgraduate students, doctoral researchers, mature undergraduates, sessional teaching staff, early-career researchers, and professional services workers fall entirely outside it. As someone who is both a doctoral student and a staff member, I am in the position of navigating this daily. NUS Scotland made the logical extension of this policy explicit in their recommendations, calling for free bus travel to be extended to all students regardless of age (NUS Scotland, 2023). That extension has not happened.

For those outside the scheme, the costs are specific and cumulative. On the subway, a contactless single costs £1.80 and a contactless all-day ticket costs £3.40. For those buying paper tickets at the station, a return costs £3.50 and an all-day paper ticket costs £4.45 (SPT, 2026). First Bus adult singles in Greater Glasgow start from £2.45 and rise to £7.05 depending on the zone, with a four-week City/Local pass at £85 and a four-week Network pass at £110 (First Bus, 2026). For anyone combining bus and subway, or travelling by train from beyond the city boundary, these costs compound. A single outward journey into campus using multiple modes can reach £5 to £9, and that is before the return trip.

Unlike London's Oyster system or the West Midlands' Swift card, Glasgow does not have a unified multi-operator ticketing system. SPT's Zonecard offers some integration, but it does not cover all operators, and many commuters end up paying separately for each mode of travel. There is no single tap-in, tap-out system that makes cross-modal travel predictable or simple. The result is a transport landscape that is fragmented, expensive in aggregate, and most punishing for those who live furthest from campus. Given the housing market described above, that increasingly means those who can least afford to live close.

Consider a postgraduate student or a sessional staff member living in Rutherglen or Paisley, outside the free bus travel scheme, who is asked to come in for a one-hour meeting that could be held online. That journey costs them somewhere between £5 and £9 each way. It may take 45 minutes each way. For someone working part-time alongside their studies or on a fractional contract, this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a financial and logistical burden that adds up across a semester. When institutions make in-person attendance the default without examining these conditions, they are not making a neutral pedagogical choice. They are imposing a cost on the people least able to carry it.

Once you are there: what on-campus prices signal

I want to make an observation based on my own experience working at and visiting universities in Glasgow, and I want to be clear that it is my own observation rather than a sourced finding. Across Glasgow's three largest universities, the cost of a cup of coffee or tea at campus cafes varies from around £1.40 to over £2.50 for essentially the same product, in the same city, within a short distance of each other.

For a student who has gone without heating, who is working fifteen hours a week on top of their studies, and who has just paid £5 or more to get to campus, the cost of a hot drink is one more calculation in a day already full of them. The variation in pricing across the city's universities is not explained by differences in operating costs. It reflects institutional choices about whose comfort matters and who is expected to subsidize the institution's catering operation.

This is not a trivial point dressed up as a serious one. It is a legible signal, visible to every student and member of staff who uses these spaces every day, about whose interests the institution has designed itself around. In the first of these two pieces, I framed this more abstractly as a question about institutional culture and the cost of belonging. Here I am being more direct: universities that take student and staff wellbeing seriously price their campus services to reflect that. Those that do not are making a choice, and the people paying the price are the ones who can least afford it.

Decolonization and the cost of participation

The session that prompted these two pieces included significant conversation about decolonizing the curriculum: bringing in pluriversal knowledge traditions, recognizing epistemologies that have been marginalized or suppressed, and building higher education on a genuinely broad understanding of what knowledge is and where it comes from.

Glasgow's universities have a particular obligation to have this conversation honestly. These are institutions built in part on the wealth of empire, operating in a diverse and internationally connected city, serving student populations that include people from communities whose knowledge traditions have historically been either ignored by or actively extracted from Western academic institutions.

But here is what the data makes unavoidable. The NUS Scotland report shows that widening access students, those from low-income backgrounds, care-experienced students, estranged students, and disabled students, are consistently the most likely to have skipped meals, gone without heating, experienced homelessness, and considered dropping out (NUS Scotland, 2023). These groups include many, though not all, of the students from communities whose perspectives and knowledge traditions the decolonization agenda most needs in the room. If those students are surviving at a level of material precarity that makes full intellectual engagement structurally difficult, then the curriculum conversation is happening without the people it most needs. You cannot decolonize a room that not everyone can afford to enter.

This is not an argument for deferring the curriculum conversation until material conditions improve. It is an argument for recognizing that they are the same conversation. Epistemic justice and material justice are not separable. The question of whose knowledge is centered in higher education cannot be resolved while the question of who can afford to show up remains open.

What needs to change and who needs to change it

For students: the conditions described in this piece are not the result of your individual failure to manage your finances. They are structural, they are documented, and they are contested. NUS Scotland's recommendations, extending free travel to all students regardless of age, a student rent freeze, increases in grants and bursaries to real living wage levels, are specific, costed, and achievable (NUS Scotland, 2023). Know what you are owed. Use your students' association. Make demands of your institution and of the Scottish Government, because the evidence base to support those demands is already there.

For staff: many of you are navigating versions of the same pressures, particularly those in sessional, part-time, or early-career roles. The fragmented transport system, the rising rents, the question of whether it is financially rational to come in for a single meeting are not only student concerns. They are workplace conditions, and they are worth raising through trade unions, through staff governance structures, and in direct conversations with institutional leadership about how hybrid working policies are designed and applied.

For members of the public: Glasgow's universities are not separate from the city. They are anchor institutions that shape its housing market, its transport patterns, its cultural life, and its economic geography. When a university expands its student intake without attending to the housing consequences, or prices its campus services above what its own students can afford, or reverts to in-person-only provision without examining who that excludes, these are not internal institutional matters. They are decisions with consequences for the city and its communities, and the public has a legitimate interest in them.

For policymakers: the evidence is here and it is not new. Extending free bus travel to all students regardless of age is a direct and achievable intervention. A serious student housing strategy, not a collection of aspirations but a funded and enforceable plan, is overdue. Investment in a genuinely integrated, multi-modal public transport ticketing system for Glasgow would benefit students, staff, and the wider public simultaneously. And guidance to universities on hybrid provision, framed explicitly as an equity issue rather than an operational preference, would cost relatively little and make a material difference to the people currently being asked to absorb costs the institution has not accounted for.

The UNESCO roadmap I referenced in the companion piece argues that higher education "creates social wealth and builds shared value" (p. 9). That is a vision worth working toward. But social wealth is not created by institutions that ask the least-resourced members of their community to bear the greatest costs of participation. It is created by institutions that take seriously what it actually costs to belong.

This piece is a companion to "Higher Education Beyond 2030: Principles, Pedagogy, and the People We Keep Leaving Out," which makes the principled case for transformation drawing on the UNESCO roadmap.

References

First Bus. (2026). Ticket prices: Greater Glasgow. https://www.firstbus.co.uk/greater-glasgow/tickets/ticket-prices

Glasgow City Council. (2023). Glasgow declares housing emergency. https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/article/7848/Glasgow-declares-housing-emergency

Glasgow Guardian. (2026, March 1). Locked out: Glasgow's housing crisis. https://glasgowguardian.co.uk/2026/03/01/locked-out-glasgows-housing-crisis/

NUS Scotland. (2023). Fighting for students: The cost of survival. https://assets.nationbuilder.com/nus/pages/358/attachments/original/1676990009/NUS_Cost_of_living_Crisis_presentation_reduced.pdf

Office for National Statistics. (2026, February 18). Housing prices in Glasgow. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/housingpriceslocal/S12000049/

Property118. (2024). Students struggle as Scottish housing crisis worsens. https://www.property118.com/students-struggle-as-scottish-housing-crisis-worsens/

Scottish Housing News. (2023, December 1). Housing emergency declared in Glasgow. https://www.scottishhousingnews.com/articles/housing-emergency-declared-in-glasgow

Strathclyde Partnership for Transport. (2026). Subway tickets. https://www.spt.co.uk/tickets/subway-tickets/

The Tab. (2023, August 28). Glasgow ranks second for student living costs in the UK. https://thetab.com/2023/08/28/glasgow-ranks-second-for-student-living-costs-in-the-uk

Transport Scotland. (2024). Young persons' (under 22s) free bus travel. https://www.transport.gov.scot/concessionary-travel/under-22s-free-bus-travel

UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence. (2024, March 14). A struggle for a place to call home: Glasgow student housing. https://housingevidence.ac.uk/a-struggle-for-a-place-to-call-home-glasgow-student-housing/

UniNist. (2025). Cost of living in Glasgow 2025. https://uninist.com/blog/financial-planning/cost-of-living-in-glasgow-2025

Urban Living News. (2025, February 24). Glasgow student shortfall passes 6,000 beds. https://urbanliving.news/news/glasgow-student-shortfall-passes-6000-beds/

UNESCO. (2026). Transforming higher education: Global collaboration on visioning and action. https://doi.org/10.54675/SNJW1822