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Online student survey specialists Opinionpanel have found that Tory-voting students currently outnumber Labour-voting students by two to one (45% v 24%).

The most recent wave of the Opinionpanel Student Voting Study shows student support for Labour has dropped dramatically.

By contrast, the Tory vote among students has been growing since David Cameron’s October 2005 speech to Conservative Party Conference.

Polls were based on the full time undergraduate student population, who represent around a million potential voters.

Students are an influential group, so shifts in their political allegiance are likely to impact on the views of both the next generation of voters and the future political scene. Today’s students are seen as tomorrow’s higher-earners and opinion leaders.

The most striking finding from these surveys is perhaps that the Liberal Democrats are much more popular among students than they are among voters in general.

The voting preferences of students over the last four years have been analysed by University of Essex professor Paul Whiteley.

Read his report.

The student marketing calendar traditionally witnesses a frenzy of activity around this year, as brands prepare to climb over themselves to reach students during the ‘essential’ freshers period.

Yet nearly 50% of current UK students have never bothered to attend their university’s iconic giveaway and information event.

This damning news comes with a bundle of other hard-to-swallow figures from a London Student/Opinionpanel survery that will further pressure a students’ union movement struggling to stay relevant to today’s student.

It seems only 25 out of over 1000 students surveyed had any idea who the current NUS president is.

And while students’ unions provide a massive range of services, from welfare advice and representation to social events, food and entertainments, a surprising 15% of those questioned had failed to have contact with any service whatsoever.

London Student reports: “Only a small minority of students joined a society or sports club at their union, while an even smaller fraction had used academic advice services or attended a union campaign. One in sixteen have attended their union’s general meeting - and half of those never went back. Less than one in five said they’d joined a sports club, and 27 per cent joined a society.”

London Student is the student newspaper for the University of London. It is editorially independent of its publishers, ULU (University of London Union). Read the article.

Interfering parents who get involved in their adult children’s lives came under media scrutiny this year.

So called ‘helicopter parents’ who hover over their offspring and particularly influence their career decisions, were criticised as doing more harm than good by Dr Paul Redmond of Liverpool University. He described the mobile phone as “the longest umbilical cord”.

To find out what graduating students felt about parental involvement in their job search, the online recruitment website GRB conducted a survey of its database.

Here’s what they found:

• Gen Y graduates welcome parental interest and support for their careers but are less happy when the interest spills over into interference;

• 18% of parents show little or no interest in careers while 43% show a lot of interest;

• When it came to parents getting actively involved in their careers, 26% welcomed the involvement and 36% tolerated it but one in four wished that their parents would not get involved;

• Faced with a number of scenarios based on actual cases of parents getting involved, the consensus was almost entirely hostile to parents being ‘hands-on’. For example, 58% would be unhappy with parents accompanying them to careers fairs, 87% would object to parents negotiating salaries with employers, and 97% would resist parents attending job interviews. 96% would not want their parents to question an employer as to why their child might have been overlooked for promotion.

To find out more about the survey, contact Dan Hawes on 01273-200411 or d.hawes@grb.uk.com.