“When I first started drinking here, the bottom half of town was out of bounds. That’s where the squaddie bars were.” My new friend pointed out the regimental cap-badges lined up behind the spirit bottles in the nearly empty pub. These days, those knocking back shots are not soldiers, but students. And Winchester’s undergraduates, it seems, don’t buy their beer here. You can see the same shift in the architecture. In the centre of the city sits the old brick barracks. While some spots have been retained for regimental memorabilia – I have in my pocket a crumpled leaflet for the Winchester Military Museums – most are now luxury flats: three bedrooms will set you back £700,000. In their place, a short walk up the road, are a new set of brick blocks, designed for a new wave of teenagers moving to the city. Their design is more modern than military: student halls. Where once this was a garrison town, now, it’s a student city. Where once, young people flooded to Winchester to be uniformed and regimented and learn to fight and to follow orders, now, they come to study. These days, around one in six of the residents of Hampshire capital is a student at the university here – which was awarded degree granting powers in 2005. Wandering round Winchester on a worryingly warm autumn day, it was hard not to think that perhaps this change might be shaping the country more than we normally talk about. And so I looked up the stats. In 1920, there were 597,700 full time members of the armed forces. In 1952, there were 872,000; in 1990, 305,000. By 2010, that was 191,070, and the latest statistics, September 2017, show that figure at just 142,000. In 1920, 4,357 students were awarded an undergraduate degree in the UK. 1950, it was 17,000. In 1990, the figure was around 80,000. By 2010 it was 350,000 and last year, it was 400,000. The total number of students at UK higher education institutions stood at 2,280,830 in 2015/16. It’s worth noting the final two numbers in each of those sequences: this decade so far has seen a fall in the number of armed personnel of around 50,000, and an increase in the number of people graduating of 50,000.
I put the stats on a graph here. The number university degrees each year is precise, the student figures are estimates[1], but they give you a good sense of how things are moving. I suspect we could all list potential causes of these changes: peace in Europe, the automation of war and the shrinking of the empire; the rush to a knowledge economy in the wake of deindustrialisation and successful movements demanding education…. Likewise, there are obviously huge national implications from this big shift in how young people spend the years immediately after they leave school: from cultures of hierarchy to cultures of conversation, from organised violence to organised learning. A delve into data on elections – and, profoundly, the European referendum – shows the deep difference between those whose generation of school-leavers were more likely to go to the army and those who were more likely to go to university… and between those areas which still sit either side of that divide… The situation is complex, though. On recent trips to the old mining and mill towns of Shirebrook and Oldham, I saw regimental flags outside houses. I was told Armistice day parades are growing each year while other events shrink. Militarised cultures never seemed far away – seemed, if anything, to be resurgent even as the armed forces shrink. Whether this is the result of backlash – of the need for a group which feels it is culturally threatened to fly its standard, or ongoing reverberations of Iraq and Afghanistan, or something else entirely, we can all speculate. But back in Winchester, the thing which was probably most striking was the economic implication. When you think of the importance of students to the economy of any university town – or of the lack of them in a place like Mansfield, where I was similarly chatting to people a few months ago – it’s hard not to think of universities as playing a key role in shaping how the economies of places fare in the modern world.
Timeless youth
The Hampshire Chronicle headline screamed about fears of students taking over. The “Winchester rants” Facebook group (which, with 5,528 members, is about 10% as populous as the city itself) is full of arguments about the growing student population. On the one hand, there are complaints about late night noise. On the other, one man argues that the university brings wealth and cheap, zero-hour contracted workers to the city: “if you owned a bar in town, you wouldn’t be complaining”. And it’s pretty clear that student work is a key part of the local economy. Many of the people I spoke to in the street were students, and among those, it wasn’t unusual to work three eight-hour shifts a week on top of studying for a degree. The result, of course, was that almost none of them could name any extra-curricular activity – club, society, or hobby – they were involved in. The previous day, I’d been interviewing people at a workshop for youth organisations in the South East of England. While the organisations’ staff gave a whole range of answers to my questions about the challenges facing young people in the coming years, the young people themselves who I spoke to had been almost unanimous: the biggest problem they were facing was an epidemic of mental health challenges. When I asked what they thought was causing that, they talked about pressure: the pressure to get good grades at school, to get a well paid job and, ultimately, as one teenager who’s working to become a professional footballer put it, ‘to get an initial house’. According to NCVO, the demographic with the highest rates of monthly volunteering is 16 to 25 year olds, at 32%. But if Britain’s potent mix of stagnant wages and rising house prices continues, will that really hold up? And what does that mean for the thousands of organisations which rely on the time and enthusiasm of those increasingly stressed-out young people?
