Students living at home - maybe an expected but saddening trend

[mids2019]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g09p93m29o

Anecdotally this is really becoming a thing and due to costs students are eschewing the whole student experience of living away from home. As well as cost savings I think there is a perhaps savvy realisation that being thrown into a house or hall with strangers is maybe a step too far from an exploratory point of view. No one wants to be quiet one in a party flat or corridor for instance. In addition I think parents of girls fully realise some of the dangers of being away from home for an extended period perhaps for the first time combined with plenty of access to drugs and alcohol is not perhaps the safest.

However could the prospect of university just being an extension of school from a living point of view limit social mobility with students preferring a home town university to one some distance away with a better reputation?.Does work need to be done (and ideally in some fantasy world funded)_to ensure working class kids are not being put off well regarded unis because of distance?

Not everyone goes to uni, no, but this is about people choosing uni and how they do it.
Failure to launch trend is complex, financial definitely a factor but not the only cause. We are not managing to raise a generation of kids who are able to live independently

That sounds about right. DS said he spoke with his cousin who attends uni in same city and his cousin goes to lectures but doesn't talk to anyone on his course at all. DS has made friends on his though.

His cousin has to talk in tutorials but otherwise hasn't made friends. He just chooses not to talk.

DSs friend is doing another course at a different uni and echoed the same. No one talks to each other

They're all on phones!!!

Agree it's a complicated phenomenon. And it's not all about money

I think there's an issue where parents almost want to spare their offspring any pain or difficulty. See for example the comments on this thread around being at home with your nice family and mummy still doing your washing etc as better than being away from home in a grotty house share.

No doubt it's less comfortable! But is that the only important thing? I did a number of house shares in university and in my early 20s. Some of them weren't great, couple of very bad landlords as well. But I think I did learn a lot about life and how to get along with people. A lot more than I would have got from living at home.

Exactly. "But something bad might happen to them" yes it might. We can't protect them forever and our job as parents is to help them navigate the world's dangers, so they can do it without us.
My DC have gained a lot of practical life skills and also how to deal with people/situations, that they definitely wouldn't have done if they'd stayed at home. They feel confident now they can live in a city and be OK.

Kids should want to move out ideally as it’s a developmental milestone.

If parents unconsciously want to stop their kids growing / leaning into adulthood then they should consider therapy.

What is all this ‘failure to launch’ ‘launching’ business?

Are our kids space rockets now? 🚀

Reading that is depressing. So so sad. I really hope that’s not ‘the norm’ these days. Implications for life and being able to function in the real world, are worrying. Poor kids.

What is this? You don’t even need to go to uni for character development, I’m 24 and haven’t been, moved out at 16 and have lived more than most students

It's incredibly sad. DS is on a course where he has to talk and comprises of lots of engagement with others so has no choice. They all eat at the canteen together. He has just been lucky.

Moving out at 16 is very unusual.

If we "failed to launch", our "parents" would have thrown most of us out on the streets.
So the strongest ones of us managed what they could, as best as they could, given this "motivation".
I also wasn't familiar with "failure to launch". 😆
Glad to say here, my "parents" got what they deserved, nothing more, nothing less.
Gen X, another country.

My dd lives at home. She started uni in Sept. She’s made friends.

Isn't it nice that there are choices?

I come from a culture where it's normal for 20-40% of students to live in parents' home while at Uni. For as long as I can remember. No student thinks anything of it wrt choices other students made. I find bizarre the British angst about not going away to Uni.

I was pregnant at 16, lots of ways to live your life you don’t have to go to uni and get drunk every night. If you do go surely you should be focusing on studying not partying? Isnt that the whole point. Getting in less debt going to a uni nearby you can commute to is also more sensible.

Lot of catastrophing over nothing on here, really people are unsociable losers failing to launch just because they don’t want to get into loads of debt living at a uni and getting drunk every night?

Not a good one!

Where I am the nearest desirable universities are Cambridge (obviously out for most and you have to live away anyway) and London. The commutable universities closer than that languish right at the very bottom of league tables. We have had some students choose those because they need to or want to stay at home for very specific reasons but most would avoid them. And you need cars to get to all three local(ish) universities.

Gen X = The Hunger Games 😂😂. I had a great time.

100% I think the biggest factor here is cost. There is a massive issue with student loans not keeping up with costs even vaguely. Previously your basic student loans would cover accommodation plus a tiny bit towards food etc. Now the basic loan doesn’t even cover half of the majority of accommodation fees. It means having to find over £1000 a term for accommodation upfront before any other costs of food, transport, socialisation. And generally for awful standards of accommodation.
So the rest has to come from parental (where majority are not in a position to provide hundreds every month) and / or part time jobs (which are in shorter supply and can be tricky to balance with leaving enough time for studying and finding any time to actually be social)!
My DS currently does uni 3 days and works 4 shifts. Doesn’t leave much time for the typical uni experience.
If he stayed at home and commuted he would still receive almost the same loan (I think it was 90% of what he gets living away from home). That would more than cover his transport and would allow him to do much less p/t work and he would have food etc covered at home.

He is considering it for next year. They only tend to do one or two bigger nights out per term anyway due to cost.

my dd went to uni and stayed away, now back 10 years later, and has reverted to adolescence!

DD is currently in year 11, and is adamant she doesn’t want to share accommodation at uni. We were kind of set that she would live at home and attend the uni of our nearest city.

She now wants to do a course 200 miles away (it’s quite specialist so isn’t offered at a uni she could commute to).

She is still adamant she doesn’t want to share with others! She’s been at boarding school so kind of feels that she is speaking from experience saying this, and I get where she’s coming from. She is not going to relish being in halls with noise, people she doesn’t know etc. She just wants calm.

I am thinking of even buying her somewhere to live by herself, which seems madness. But I don’t want to force her in with people she may not like, while paying an absolute fortune for the ‘experience’.

It’s not like when I went, when the fees were £1k a year and rent very low!

Do you mean that there should have been more support for gen X, and the current support for general Z to stay at home at 18 is a good thing?

It seems a lot of students who live home save loads of money because they don't contribute any of their loan money to family for housekeeping? Is that normal? I have seen this debated on MN for boomerang kids before.

My DSis stayed at home for uni but my parents split up and she moved in with a boyfriend which gave her independence. But that was Scotland and loads of my friends stayed home. I was more unusual for moving away.

I feel your pain. Same with DS1.

He finds it quite depressing I think as his freedom is significantly less.

Where I work in hospitality, we have several students living at home but attending Nottingham/lloughborogh, Birmingham, Warwick and Coventry. None at Leicester but that also a short distance

its saving them a lot £££

there are a few of the 6th formers that have gone off to uni and live away, coming home and working holidays and some weekends

Both mine lived on campuses and it was the making of them. They grew in confidence and learnt how to navigate being thrown in with different personalities. I also get the relief of not worrying about them when they are out because I don't know about it. It is though very challenging on a financial level. One has since graduated and now lives with gf, the other is currently house sharing and intends on finding a job in that area after graduating. I feel they have successfully launched into the bigger world.

We live within an hours drive of about 6 universities. Both mine stayed at home(we are in Scotland so tuition fees are paid) and most of dd and ds’s school friends and also now uni friends are all staying at home.

Both of mine went to the same university as it was the highest rated university in Scotland for their courses,

it takes dd 30-40 minutes on the bus to get to uni, which is our nearest city, It hasn’t hindered her social life and she has made really good friends. She has more uni friends than she does school friends as they drifted apart,

ds on the other hand went to uni right through covid and didn’t make many university friends (his only normal year at uni was 4th year) so still has all his school friends,