A third of UK students now planning to live at home

[born2bme]

Interesting stats here showing the cost of living impact on students:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70gy180e8lo

A third of new UK students now planning to live at home.
Nearly 10% of new Open University students are school leavers.
And "most" full time students reportedly working in term time.

You can see their point, but it's yet another HE revenue stream that's going to take a hit as a result.

It is interesting but unsurprising I guess. I do find it a shame for students now though as I don't think you get the same university experience living at home.

Hmm, but I think that if they can't fill accomodation with first years they will offer rooms to students in years 2 or 3 or 4. I was able to move back onto campus in my fourth year and into a flat with specified friends - you applied as a group- and it was great.
It's so expensive but I do think that living away from home is a learning experience.

What I find really awful about this is that the unaffordability of student accommodation means that those like me who had a difficult home life and lived nowhere near a decent uni now are basically being priced out of HE. Where would I have done the OU? At my abusive mother’s where she regularly smashed the place up and attacked me or at my alcoholic father’s, where there were no beds let alone a desk?! If I was leaving school in the 2020s, I would have been trapped in a MW job with no prospects just living to pay rent. God knows what would happen to my friend who came to uni to get away from her parents who were actively trying to arrange her marriage to someone in Pakistan.

If theres hardly anyone leaving home to attend uni there will be a LOT of brand new fancy accommodation lying empty near our Uni’s.

It’s everywhere in Glasgow. They just bang it up. Some office closed bang theres uni accommodation there instead. Spare ground near a uni, bang theres accommodation there too.

Hopefully the cost of private halls will come down. In London, it mostly seems to be filled with wealthy international students and prices are shocking.

There is approx £1,500 between the the max maintenance for living at home vs away, and accommodation is £6-8k.
Financially, living away makes no sense.
Students living away have part time jobs, which is killing off a lot of the clubs and societies because a lot are run by students who don't have time or energy.
Mine are both away, but equally at a push, they could commute. One has a course mate that does. Newcastle - Manchester. Some unis offer temporary mid week accommodation that costs less than full time.

Accommodation is insanely expensive, though standards are better than they used to be.

It must be a very different university experience if you live at home, I know it makes sense financially but I wonder if they’ll miss out on some of the broadening of life and experience you’d get by mixing with all those different people in halls.

I grew up in a very white middle class suburb in the north, going to university in the south with a broad range of people was really valuable as a way to expand my understanding of people and the world.

That was probably more important to me than the subject I studied (history, now forgotten all of it and never used it professionally).

My kids are both autistic and we live in reach of a range of universities, so the likelihood is they’ll stay fairly local but I hope they’ll live at uni at least for some of the time.

There’s a lot of international students who live in halls.

quite a few unis have real shortages of halls and maybe this will mean for them all first years can live in halls.

not surprised at the trend though London has always had lots of students who live at home and now it’s getting more common across other big cities.

Ive noticed a lot more second and third years in halls amongst my sons friends. I guess its filling up the spaces.

Interesting in the the sense they are so broad they don’t really tell us much we didn’t know already @born2bme . If you dig down a bit you’ll find many of the more local universities - Liverpool John Moores being a prime example - where the percentage living at home has always been above the, largely meaningless, average. Nottingham Uni and Nottingham Trent have always had very different figures - what would have been useful is if the article had shown how that gap has narrowed, (or not), and what the picture is at those unis which have traditionally had far lower percentages of students living at home. Durham would be an interesting one.

The general trend is clear, but quite how that plays out in detail is far more nuanced. And may well show a widening gap between, for want of a better phrase, the “haves and have nots”.

its certainly a good discussion to have, and a thread well worth starting.

There will still be plenty needing to live in. Not everyone lives near a suitable university.

Yep, I had nowhere to live either. Even if I had where I grew up the nearest university was an hours drive by car, or 2.5 hours on the bus, or two train journeys, one an hour and the other an hour and twenty minutes. The earliest bus would get you to the city for just after 10:30, then the university was the other side of the city, the last but left at about 2pm. The trains only ran until 4:30 and again, the station was nowhere near uni so more buses.

Unless you already live in a city, or you’re wealthy enough to have had driving lessons, a car and insurance it isn’t possible for a lot of people to live at home.

Yes, mine is staying at home.
I'm not really concerned about lack of uni experience. He's already independent, has a ton of friends and hobbies, drives and has a job.
He's very sporty and plans to join a few clubs.
We've already moved to more of a flat mate relationship, he does chores, cooks, picks up shopping etc. Years of training have paid off 😂.
But yes also makes sense financially. I'm a lone parent and 1 salary just does not stretch far enough to support 2 adults.
He's taken a loan this year but likely won't need one next year, We've done the sums and it should last 2 years with his job, he will be contributing to his food/household costs and he'll still be left with more disposable income than me!

My generation saw about 20% of people going to uni and both Dh and I went. He went to a high ranking one, I went to one much lower down the rankings. Other parents our age didn't go and believe that there are student loans so their child will take those loans.

They don't know until it is too late that this is based on household income and that they are expected to cover the shortfall. The loan this year is just over £5k for outside London. Ds's accommodation is £8700 self catered. Because we knew we would have to support Ds we had saved money for both our children in case they went to uni. We had years to do this.

When did sixth form tell us about finances? Year 13. This is far, far too late. This is something that should be told to parents when children are choosing options so they have advance warning. We are lucky that we do have a high ranking RG uni on our doorstep but a lot of children want to go away to uni, they see staying here as not being adventurous. Some live in halls in first year to get that experience but then commute after that.

Not everyone has a great uni they can easily commute to. A gap year, working full time and saving up would mean a child could potentially fund themselves through uni alongside loans.

I agree. Locking people out or really confining their choices. I confess hadn't thought of the incredibly tough circumstances you are talking about, but that is even worse. And of course teenager rarely talk of these things, they just try to silently cope.

I was thinking how it must be affecting the home students who perhaps in earlier years would have considered applying to high ranking Uni's, but now don't even consider it as costs too prohibitive. It cannot be good for social mobility which is a great shame and a loss of potential.

My child did a gap year to work to fund uni. This is also increasingly common also. Unfortunately this is also not much help if you need to leave an abusive home as you will have rent.

(I work at a sixth firm college and we saw a trend of students picking home unis or gaps years massively increasing and gap years changed from travel to full time work. We support applications for the year after they left).

Do agree with this. Time flies when the kids are at school. And so much talk about students in the past not knowing what they were signing up to with student loans... Well, there are so many variables, that it is almost impossible for anyone to know what they are signing up to.

It should be mandatory for school kids to work out a budget along side each University choice. Yes, it will depend on an unknown accommodation allocation, but they need to know the range they would be committing to. The funding of it can remain a private family decision, but there should be greater emphasis on cost and alternatives to Uni. No one wants to squash a young person's aspirations, but better they are aware earlier than later.

I know there will be lots of people come back to me to say this is a parents job. I don't disagree - that is true too. The point is to open up the conversation very clearly and early, before hearts are set.

The year that tuition fees were first brought in one of my students did an EPQ in which she surveyed students in our 6th Form college about course choices and decisions where to go, comparing that with destinations of the previous year students. She found that nearly 1/3 of them had made a decision to stay at home and/or to do a course that would more likely lead to a job rather than a study a subject they wanted to explore. And that their decision was influenced by costs. I'm sure the cost of living crisis we've been in almost constantly since then hasn't helped.

My two both stayed home. DD1 graduated last year and her uni had no accommodation, it’s a bespoke uni in central London that offers only one subject area. Dd2 chose a London uni and commutes in 30 minutes. Both have fab friends, both including dd2 have friends who commute. It works well and’s less debt

International student numbers are trending downwards.

@NamechangeRugby the sixth form where my children went said that 75% of the children applying to uni from their cohort were first in the household to apply. I actually do agree with you on school also teaching it too but also informing parents with a table showing incomes and maintenance loan amounts. I know Save The Student has this table.

I may be wrong but I believe people don't openly talk about salaries and then Student Finance applications roll around and suddenly parents have to disclose their income if they fall under the threshold cut off and have to then provide proof of their income.

Both my children have taken tuition loans and the minimum maintenance loan as they lived away from home, as good as our local RG uni is there are others that are more highly regarded. They don't see it as a debt just this is how much my net salary is. Even if they lived at home they would have taken the tuition loans. As it stands we have supported them to the tune of £16k for Ds1 and £18K for Ds2, he is going into his final year next month. So £34k in total not including kitting them out. This is why parents need to know early on.

A 50 minute journey to uni daily sounds miserable, and realistically there will be days when it will take much longer as the trains are hardly reliable.

I'm fortunate to live in London with lots of excellent universities within an easy commute (quite a few in walking distance) but friends who moved out to the suburbs won't have as many options and have limited their dcs a bit. It is definitely something to think about when thinking about places to live, beyond the usual school catchments and family neighbourhood issues. People often don't think so far ahead when planning the move to a suburban or rural dream home.

@Darragon Those on full loans who chose a university wisely are not priced out. The full loan is enough for cheaper halls found in some uni cities and it’s enough to live on during term time if the student goes no frills!

However, on mn, students must have en suite rooms, want to go home all the time and want all the mod cons of home. Yes there are eye watering rents but when you dig deeper, dc have discounted anything cheaper. They are entitled to have their wants met apparently!

Often poor students get a bursary too and my DN used this for holidays! Thanks uni for £2000 untaxed holiday money. Poor students with a full loan are often better off than students whose parents don’t give them the money they should and it’s these students who are better off staying at home.

However it’s a city vs countryside divide. We have 3 unis within 25 miles. Oxford or Bucks at High Wycombe. So top rated and near the bottom. Not much of a choice and no one here would stay at home! Neither have public transport from our village. So I suspect this is a city issue with a choice of universities - eg Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, London etc.

It would do DD the world of good to go away to uni and live away from home, but I also respect it is her choice and her debt at the end of the day, so if she chooses to live at home we will support that decision. We are lucky that we are in London so she will have a good set of universities to choose from.

Ask me 10 years ago and I would have said that our DC would definitely all move away for uni, but it is a very different picture now.