Doing nothing will cease to be an option It has become a platitude, at this point in similar studies, to say that doing nothing is not an option. This ignores the fact that many universities have done exactly that. It is not a good option. The widespread issues over quality in a lot of old and poorly-maintained university stock have an impact on student well-being, mental health, and individual academic success. Whether this in turn has an impact on recruitment, retention and reputation largely depends on the underlying academic strength of the institution. Those at the top of the league table are better inured against this impact: for every student who cannot afford their accommodation (or having seen it cannot abide the thought of living in it) and chooses to study somewhere else, another student will take their place. Those towards the middle and bottom of the league table tend to measure this impact more readily, and on the whole have done more to improve their residential estates to ensure that accommodation is not an open-day turn-off. This is the picture we get from a helicopter view of the sector. If we zoom in we can of course see many accommodation teams in institutions at the top of the league table who see at first hand the impact it has on students, and who are doing their level best to convince their executive teams and governing bodies that doing nothing should not be an option. Therefore, perhaps it is more accurate and fairer to say that ‘doing nothing is an option that only a minority of voices in universities are advocating, but is the default option for universities who have found it difficult to make a successful case for investment’. And that ‘minority of voices’ tends not to say that poor- quality accommodation somehow doesn’t matter, but rather that it shouldn’t be a university’s issue in the first place, and that the private sector should be leant on to deal with it, be it through selling off assets or replacing with nominations at off-campus schemes. Social space at Unite Students’ Sky Plaza, Leeds A Student First Group research report | April 2026 | Page 37