a whole HEPI report on this. https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HEPI_Somewhere-to-live_Report-121-FINAL.pdf Not that many years old (2019)
To quote from the Exec Summary:
The overwhelming majority of full-time students in Britain leave home to attend university. This marks British higher education out as unusual when judged against most international comparators.
It means that most British universities have diverged from their past and from how experts have repeatedly expected them to develop in the future. It also means that they differ from what policymakers seem to want from them now.
This report traces the history of residence in British higher education, showing that the current situation grew out of student demand, institutional ambition, and the actions of the state. The creation of a national university system enabled mass mobility and widening participation actually encouraged the belief that student life should be lived away from home.
Such was the power of this ideal that it survived cuts in public support and rising fees. At present, it is even overcoming the growth in rent levels. It seems likely to continue, with important consequences for students, their families, universities and the communities in which they are based, as well as for government.
Given this, Somewhere to Live concludes by arguing that we urgently need to start a debate about student residence; not because it is necessarily bad, but because we have no clear sense of what it is for. Rediscovering the reasons why British students came to study away from home may allow us to rethink why and how they should do so in the future
and from the report introduction
In Britain, in the academic year 2017-18, just over 80 per cent of full-time students left home for study. Forty-eight per cent of these students lived in purpose-built halls and 52 per cent lived in private rented accommodation.
In Ireland, by contrast, nearly half of undergraduates live with their parents and, in Australia, students are more likely to live in the family home than anywhere else.
Across Europe as a whole, the pattern is strikingly divergent from the British model: on average, 36 per cent of European students live in their parental home and only 18 per cent reside in student accommodation. Although some national systems – especially in Scandinavia do resemble, or even exceed, Britain in their enthusiasm for student mobility, it remains the case, as a recent and reliable report observes, that ‘in 64 per cent of countries living with parents is the most common housing form.’
Even in America, with its long tradition of residential universities and its growing industry of student accommodation providers, nearly 40 percent of students live at home and 77 per cent attend college in their home state.