Accommodation cost at uni

Cost!

Dd is in her first year at Bristol. Yes it's expensive but it is an amazing uni to be at.
She got catered which with Cody of living I think I'd probably a cheaper option overall!
Next year is £150pw plus bills for a flat right at the heart of the uni.

@yoyo1234 oh I'm sorry! I thought you had misread (and the autocorrect sort of made sense for once 🤣)

Aargh no one cleans it unless you do

En suite not ensure. If you have an en suite bathroom to your room no one clean is unless you do.

If it’s shared it gets a weekly clean.

All excellent points though and worth the triple emphasis 😀

oops

Think we got the message @ShaunaTheSheep

Definitely do the research, decide your priorities and make a list in order of preference and hope you get lucky!

Cost
Location
Catered/self catered
Size of flat
En-suite or shared
Modern/slightly tired!

At one DC's uni there is very little cheap self catering, and the choice is basically modern with en-suite or older but catered. They sensibly chose food, better value for money. And the shared bathrooms are cleaned daily. En-suite you clean your own!

Definitely do the research, decide your priorities and make a list in order of preference and hope you get lucky!

Cost
Location
Catered/self catered
Size of flat
En-suite or shared
Modern/slightly tired!

At one DC's uni there is very little cheap self catering, and the choice is basically modern with en-suite or older but catered. They sensibly chose food, better value for money. And the shared bathrooms are cleaned daily. En-suite you clean your own!

Definitely do the research, decide your priorities and make a list in order of preference and hope you get lucky!

Cost
Location
Catered/self catered
Size of flat
En-suite or shared
Modern/slightly tired!

At one DC's uni there is very little cheap self catering, and the choice is basically modern with en-suite or older but catered. They sensibly chose food, better value for money. And the shared bathrooms are cleaned daily. En-suite you clean your own!

@ShaunaTheSheep
Exactly. So no student needs to pay £9000 for self catering in Bristol. The £9400 is for a studio at Wills so bigger than a standard room. I’m also aware that students often don’t look for value but want ensuite bathrooms. Most universities have accommodation at a variety of price points. You just have to do the research.

Bristol offers 3 'villages' basically Stoke Bishop, Clifton and the City Centre. Stoke Bishop includes a free bus pass to the uni and city centre.

And yes, Wills is £8k up to £9.4k (catered)
However, University Hall next door is £4.8k (self-catered).

I have 3 DC at uni, all on minimum loan (we are just over the threshold). I pay their rent and they live on the loan, it's the only fair way to do it when rent varies so widely from city to city.

Uni owned accommodation/ halls are generally 10 month contracts running sep-june.
You can pay termly or sometimes monthly.
Private student accommodation is usually 11 months contract sept- July , pay monthly.
Inevitably you pay for some time you're not there. It's in landlords interest you keep it occupied and make as much money as possible throughout the year !

DD liked it there. It was only 10 mins on the bus to her faculty. They shared taxis back on a night out. Didn’t seem a big deal. The university at Clifton hasn’t changed much I think. Maybe Clifton is the “campus”. I think Bristol is a great place to be a student.

yeh @TizerorFizz the "campus" reference to Bristol puzzled me too. I was a student there and there is no campus, unless much has changed in the city (unlikely). I was in halls at SB and it was fine, if a long way away. This is back when you got a grant and no fees tho so ...

University of Bristol doesn’t have a campus or accommodation in it. I’m confused. It has accommodation in the city, in Clifton and at Stoke Bishop. DD was in Wills in SB. That’s a catered hall (half board) and the rooms there are not £9000 pa with food included! It’s perfectly possible to get cheaper places with self catering but students get fixated on modern and “must have” locations instead of looking for value Mould is probably a ventilation issue.

@Notellinganyone fair enough. I used that a as an example because most unis offer it and after about her seventh open-day talk of "we offer everything from Beowulf to beyonce" dd was getting a little jaded. Maybe just the unis she looked at offered very similar options.

I would like to add btw, another reason for looking at the accommodation offer. I often read on MN of parents saying they will pay their dc's rent and they will live off the loan. That's great for them, but it certainly isn't everyone's story.

At one point I had two dc at uni and there is no way I have £10-12k spare. So despite what you might read, some students DO pay their rent out of their loan. I top up my dc (they get about 80% loan) but they pay or paid their own rent. Hence we needed to make sure it wasn't in the £7-8k area as that would have left them v little to live on.

@clary - that’s absolutely not true about Eng Lit. I’m an English Teacher and 6th form tutor and courses vary a lot depending on the Uni.

To be honest we put her down on some other lists for as and when accommodation elsewhere came up after she’d been there a couple of weeks but it’s been really over subscribed and this year people have been placed in accommodation in Bath and are having to travel in to Bristol so because she already had local accommodation she must have been way down the lists as she’s never been contacted. I think at this stage it’s likely she’ll just wait it out where she is, the course finishes in May I think!
The halls she chose were on campus, she liked a few and put them down as her choices, they were cheaper, I think around £165 per week but they all had a bathroom shared with one other. But the living areas were much nicer. What she’s been allocated, we didn’t even know was an option!
she does have her own bathroom where she is but the living area for the 6 of them had a 2 seater sofa and nothing else, there are 6 stools squeezed around the tiny island though! We had to buy her a dehumidifier for her room for the damp and the container gets full every couple of days.
she’s not had the best experience so far but hoping this improves in her second year.

@yoyo1234
My DD had perfectly good rentals in Bristol. It’s also not true shared bathrooms are not sought after. Wills Quad has lots of them and it’s a very popular hall. It’s catered, so not the cheapest, but it’s very friendly. DD even had a shared room so you can keep costs down.

Liverpool can be expensive for student halls. That’s always a surprise. He’s got a good selection of universities. After y1, imperial students can get spread out. Overseas students are high in numbers and can often afford accommodation nearer to the university. Others might be further out. It’s a world class university. Probably better than Cambridge for Engineering as it’s a specialist stem university. Cambridge, with all due respect, isn’t.

Exactly Clary

@Notellinganyone - that is precisely why I emphasised one factor.

There may be some courses where the course is unique, but overwhelmingly there are a few, or in some cases several or even many courses that offer similar.
People put all sorts of factors into the equation as Clary has said.
If there were a particular course that were perfect and even unique, then accommodation prices might lead a student into making decisions like deferring a year, working and saving up.

No-one is suggesting choosing a University just for the accommodation, but, as said in my previous post there are lots of considerations to factor in.