If your uni student dc lives at home and commutes

His situation sounds hard enough without him paying for your choice to give up work and be a carer. It's not like he'll have time to work with that degree.

Surely you want to give him every chance to succeed in his studies which means being able to afford transport, all text books, laptop, not having to find employment while studying etc.

No, neither did.

Dd lived at home for her first degree and no i didn’t charge her.

Have to say a 90 min commute each way is going to be brutal. I’m really not sure it will be doable. Three hours of travel a day, and medical students are on campus a lot! And are expected to study and revise a lot. He’s not going to be able to concentrate on revising, writing assignments on a train!

Plus how much will he spend on commuting? As he will get a smaller loan if he lives at home it may all be eaten up in train fares.

How will he manage when he’s on placement and expected to be at a hospital at 8am? And no choice of which hospital he gets placed at? Or needs to do a night shift? Do the trains run frequently and are they reliable? Do they run late in the evening?

you’ll still get your UC for your other kids . Rent and council tax paid .
do you want some of his student loan too ?

I think he would be better off living at uni . He will barely be at home with that commute so he will probably eat at uni .
im sure you can absorb his electric and gas costs from your other benefits ?

are there no closer universities he can apply to? Even if they’re not his preferred choice? Ultimately a medical degree is a medical degree!

though of course no guarantee he would get a place at his preferred or nearest universities anyway. 🤷‍♀️

Do you also realise that the likelihood of that one uni offering him a place is quite low? He should be applying for 4, plus a back up in another subject if he wants to. It's a bit of a lottery whether his test scores etc will be exactly what the uni accepts.

You said you'd go back to work which suggests you worked prior to caring and the fact you're asking if others charged their children suggests you are hoping you get the 'ok' to do so yourself.

Dd lives at home and is now in her 3rd year of a healthcare degree. She gets a 1000 bursary and doesn't have any loans.
We don't charge her anything for living here, we pay for household bills and food. she has use of a car to commute, we pay the running costs and insurance but she pays for her fuel.
She has a job and funds her own expenses and has a good amount saved towards a house deposit.

Your circumstances are different and you stand to lose money if ds lives at home. It doesn't sound like a realistic plan to commute so far everyday, and how will he manage placements?

I think you really need to look at all options.

No contribution here until working full-time. I personally wouldn’t expect anything of your son.

I think you need to see what has left after the travel costs from his mantaince loan?
A small contribution towards food and bills would be fair ,my oldest stayed at home in the 1st year and his travel wasn't much as we lived in London near uni.
He gave me l think about £40 a week for food and towards bills, much cheaper for him that paying for his own food and bills.
Edited to add this was about 12 years ago and l was in a similar situation as you are. Now l could support him but then l absolutely couldn't afford to keep him without some contribution.

90 minutes when doing medicine seems almost impossible. I don’t know that much about it but my:DD’s flatmate does medicine and they made sure they got a house as close as possible to the building so he could get there as easily as possible because the housrs were so antisocial.

Hi. If your dc lives at home, would they get the maintenance loan? I am asking because my daughter did commute her second year and she got a lower loan, it covered just travel costs really, for what she said, she couldn’t apply for a maintenance loan because she lived at home. Her loan that year was around £3k.

I commute and I agree with others here that it is brutal. It is very easy to underestimate just how tiring it is. In my case it’s only doable because I WFH a lot. Your DS won’t and, as others have said, may be working nights/awkward shifts on placements. It will also further distance him from his classmates. He may welcome that but he won’t have time to decompress (very important for my ASD DD), do his hobbies or do any sports either. Could he manage university accommodation? Are there any places with shorter commutes he could apply to? (Sorry I know this doesn’t address your question but long commutes really are absolute buggers)

He would get more loan if he lived at uni, and no travel costs if he lived close by. If you can't afford to keep/feed him then you'll have to ask for something surely if he lives at home? The train fares are quite a big cost though. Can he save up some money before he starts? Learn to drive and get a car?

I think you both need to double check what his loans will be. I might be a little out of date, but when I last was looking at this, those who lived at home couldn't qualify for as much as those living away, specifically because they were considered not to have housing costs. So they didn't receive money to afford a contribution to rent.
I also think that travel cost is going to be really significant for a student.

I was a commuter student living at home at that age. No, I never paid anything for my rent. I did do a lot of my own food shopping, did my own laundry, cleaning, washing up, took care of the dog, etc. I worked both PT and FT at various points and there were also times when I did not work and my mum gave me spending money. I had no student loans or any student finance.

Why shouldn't your DC contribute to household bills? If he was living on campus, he would be paying hundreds each month in rent plus food. If he lives at home, even with commuting costs, he will still be better off so could afford to make a contribution while still having money for some fun, clothing etc. If you can't afford NOT to have him contribute, then that is how it will have to be.

Having said that, I believe only about 15% of medical school applicants get a place first time around and it seems to be becoming a multi-year process for some. This may all be academic if your DS is one of the majority who doesn't get a place (does he realise how competitive it is?) and there are many other factors to applying for medical school, rather than just location.

After all that, I agree with others who say that three hours spent commuting each day is going to be very difficult to manage, and impossible once he starts placement. Again, depending on which medical school he ends up at, some front load a lot of the academics so he might get through a couple years before being on placement but some start earlier, so all things to consider.

I think you both have to be brutally honest about the extent to which his suspected condition limits his life.
If it’s a question of clinging to a comfort zone (with built-in cook and housekeeper) rather than major emotional upsets causing disruptive and distressing behaviour, as an example, then he needs to cop himself on about adulthood and the fact that any big transition is difficult.
We all walked in trepidation, hearts in our mouths and alone, for quite a time as First Years!
But you keep on going until the invisible barriers melt away for you.
Experiencing more of what university life offers is an important part of a degree, and if he is at all capable of joining a hobby group or a choir, say, maybe social awkwardness would become easier to wrangle.
You make him sound as though he has decided that no further personal development is possible, and if that isn’t really true of him, he should be encouraged to try living on campus or in digs, I reckon.
(A broader student experience would make him a better doctor, too)

DS lives at home but thats because we didn't want him to take out a loan for maintenance. He has a part time job to cover going out etc but we pay food etc. Is he getting a full loan?

I have ASD ended up dropping out of uni a 90 min train ride from my home due to the unreliability of trains. I was doing biomedical science and missed so many of the morning lectures it was a nightmare. I still did and passed my first year exam but the stress of commuting was too much.

I don't think you can really be that fussy with medicine! You choose 6 that would be okay and take whatever you get offered.

My daughter is AuDHD. She tried to live at University, but she couldn’t do it, the social aspect was too much, and she is now going to commute 1.5 hours each way 4 days a week for her final years. Her choice. We are not charging her keep as there is no way she could cope with a job on top.

Isn't part of the student loans for living expenses?