Student Finance and Wellbeing Study Scotland 2023/24: literature review

8. Financial management and wellbeing

Some groups of students have been found to face higher levels of financial difficulty than others; for example, estranged students; student parents; disabled students, and other students from underrepresented backgrounds (NUS Scotland, 2022; 2023). Estranged students in particular face high levels of precarity and poverty (Taylor and Costa, 2019; Costa, et al., 2020; Minty et al., 2022). Unable to access financial support from their families, they are not able to access the same levels of bursary that care experienced students are entitled to. A survey by NUS Scotland (2022) found that estranged students responding to the survey reported the greatest levels of financial worry, were the most likely to consider leaving their course due to finances, and to report that their mental health had been impacted by worrying about finances; 84% of estranged students said that worrying about finances had impacted their mental health compared with 64% of all students surveyed.

Worries about finances is a particularly prominent theme across a number of surveys on student finance: a report from NUS indicated that 60% of students worry about finances frequently or all the time (NUS, 2022), and the Student Money Survey (2022) reported that 82% of students worried about making ends meet. This has knock-on effects on overall mental health and academic achievement: 69% of students indicated that their mental health had suffered due to financial worries, and 31% reported a similar effect on their grades (NUS Scotland, 2022; Student Money Survey, 2022). Research by the Mental Health Foundation in partnership with Universities Scotland (Maguire and Cameron, 2022) and Colleges Scotland (Maguire et al., 2022) involved surveys of more than 17,000 college and university students in Scotland to explore students’ experiences of mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found 74% of university students, and 64% of college students, reported low mental wellbeing. The link between mental wellbeing and finances was highlighted, with three-quarters of college students who reported low mental wellbeing having experienced food insecurity or had a long-term health condition, and half had a disability.

Mental health is compounded by the cost of living crisis: 91% of students surveyed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2023) were worried about the rising cost of living, and 79% of those surveyed by the Russell Group Student’s Union (2023) said their mental health had suffered due to the crisis.

Worries caused by financial difficulties can also impact on retention and drop out. In response to a non-representative online survey of 1786 students polled between May and August 2023 as part of the Student Money Survey (Save the Student, 2023), 71% of students said they had thought about dropping out of university at some point. Mental health (59%) and money worries (54%) were the most common reasons for this. Additionally, 31% of students responding to the Student Money Survey said their grades had suffered because of them worrying about money. In Scotland, 37% of students responding to NUS Scotland’s online survey (2023) said they had considered dropping out for financial reasons, while just over a fifth (21%) had missed classes because they could not afford travel costs. Drop out is particularly high among estranged students. In a survey of estranged students undertaken by Stand Alone, an advocacy group for those who are estranged from their families, financial stress was identified as the main reason for estranged students withdrawing from their studies, followed by health and wellbeing (Bland, 2015).

In response to the rapidly increasing cost of living, students are engaging in several cost-cutting behaviours, including: skipping meals; using less electricity or gas; increasing paid working hours; skipping classes to reduce travel costs; and using food banks (Save the Student, 2023; NUS Scotland, 2023). An online survey of FE, HE and PG students in Scotland found that 52% of respondents had skipped a meal because of a lack of money; 45% had gone without heating due to a lack of money and 35% had been unable to pay their rent in full. An earlier non-representative online survey by the NUS (2022) of 3,417 students and apprentices across the UK found that between January and June 2022, students’ use of food banks doubled, with estranged students one of the groups more likely to have used food banks and more likely to have reduced their food consumption.