More students planning to live at home for university over ‘insane’ living costs

Living at Home for University: A Nine-Year Record as Costs Outpace Student Budgets

Constantvpn.com – For the first time in nearly a decade, more than one in three UK 18-year-olds accepted into higher education have told admissions officials they intend to remain at their family home throughout their degree. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) recorded over 81,000 such declarations this cycle — a figure that marks a sharp departure from 2017, when roughly one in five applicants in the same age bracket made the same choice. The upward trajectory is not confined to a single region: Scotland reports 48% of its applicants opting to stay put, while Wales sits at 20%, yet every part of the UK shows the same directional shift.

The driver, by the students’ own accounts, is straightforward arithmetic. Accommodation prices have climbed steeply in recent years, and the gap between what a maintenance loan covers and what a room actually costs has widened to the point where commuting — or forgoing campus life altogether — becomes the rational financial decision.

Two Friends, Two Commutes, One Calculation

Beatrice and Amelia, both from St Helens in Merseyside, made the decision independently but arrived at the same conclusion: they will not move into halls this September. Beatrice has secured a place at the University of Manchester to study mathematics and plans to travel by train, a round-trip journey totalling around 50 minutes. Amelia will attend Liverpool John Moores University, roughly 20 minutes away by rail.

“My first choice was Manchester and then my second was Liverpool, so I knew I could commute,” Beatrice explains, noting that the accommodation she researched would have cost “a few grand a year.”

Amelia’s numbers were even starker. The rooms she identified in Liverpool ranged from £300 to £400 per week — a weekly outlay that, over a typical academic year, dwarfs the cost of a season of train tickets. Neither friend is enthusiastic about the daily commute, yet both say they intend to participate fully in lectures, societies, and social events while sleeping in their childhood bedrooms.

The Human Cost of “Insane” Prices

Jessica, another incoming student at Liverpool John Moores University, frames the choice less as a budgeting exercise and more as a small grief. She had wanted to live on campus, to inhabit the full texture of student life, but found the rental market what she calls “ridiculous” and “insane.”

“I have a part-time job as everything is so expensive, and then commuting is going to kill a lot of my free time as well. It is a bit sad really when you think about it.”

What does console her, she admits, is the prospect of her parents’ cooked dinners at the end of each day — a small domestic comfort that no campus kitchen replicates.

The scale of savings can be substantial. Earlier this year, a first-year student documented her daily 90-minute commute into Manchester and calculated that she was saving more than £7,000 on accommodation over the course of the year. For a household already stretched by inflation, that figure is not marginal; it is the difference between financial stability and precarity.

The Broader Cost Picture

The Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) estimated last year that a student needs approximately £61,000 over a three-year degree to maintain what it terms a “minimum socially acceptable standard of living” — a figure that excludes tuition fees entirely. In 2024, the weekly cost of renting in university-owned accommodation spanned from £108 (for 40- to 44-week contracts in Northern Ireland) to £338 (for the shortest contracts in London). In the capital, rent alone accounts for nearly half — 46% — of a student’s total living costs. Across most other regions, weekly rents cluster between £140 and £180, with privately run halls typically priced above the university-run average.

Maintenance loans, available to most full-time undergraduates, were designed to bridge the gap between income and expenditure. Yet student unions report that the average annual price of a campus room is rising far faster than the loan amount, leaving a widening shortfall. Hepi’s data indicate that the majority of young full-time students now hold paid employment during term time specifically to close that gap.

A Shift in How Young People Define University

The financial pressure is reshaping not just where students sleep but what form their education takes. The Open University, long associated with mature learners balancing work and study from home, reports that almost 3,400 18- and 19-year-olds enrolled last year. They constituted 9.5% of all new starters — up from 5.7% six years earlier. Vice-chancellor Prof Dave Phoenix describes the trend as evidence of a fundamental rethinking among younger people about what university should look like.

“It means they can avoid moving costs and high accommodation bills and, for others, it means keeping a job,” Phoenix says of online study.

Yet the question of whether distance learning or home-based commuting can replicate the formative value of on-campus life remains contested. A recent report by Prof William Whyte of the University of Oxford argues that the communal, immersive character of residential university extends well beyond academics — shaping social networks, professional identity, and civic engagement in ways that a bedroom commute cannot fully substitute.

What is clear, however, is that the economic calculus has tipped. With a record number of UK 18-year-olds accepted into university this year and rents continuing to outpace loan adjustments, the home-based student is no longer an exception. It is becoming the default assumption, and institutions — from commuter-friendly timetabling to flexible online delivery — will increasingly be judged by how well they accommodate it.