Rise of the stay-at-home student? More Gen Z are living with mum and dad while at university - as rent costs soar

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

For many, university is remembered as a time full of messy house shares, raucous parties and bleary group debriefs the morning after the night before.
But it has now been revealed more Gen Z students than ever are giving up the chaotic joys of student digs to live with mum and dad instead, according to new figures.
Nearly a third of 18-year-old applicants in the UK for the academic year 2024-25 planned to stay at home, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) said.
This some 30 per cent figure is more than double that seen around 20 years ago, the Times reports - and also the highest recorded in this same timeframe.
In 2007, only 14 per cent of teens said they would not be moving out during their studies - and even more recently, in 2015, this figure had only risen to 21 per cent.
It comes as the financial burden of a degree balloons, with rents as high as £1,000 a month, parents unable to help out and an alive and well cost-of-living crisis.
An average student's debts at graduation typically tot up to an eye-watering £53,000.
And this is likely to only get worse after next month, when annual tuition fees will increase from £9,250 to £9,535.
Stay-at-home student living started to peak sharply after the Covid pandemic, which saw families get used to rubbing along together at home during lockdowns.
It came after a similar rise after the 2008 financial crash, after which family budgets suddenly became tight.
Back in 1984-85, only around eight per cent of freshers lived at home, according to a 2020 report from the now-defunct Higher Education Funding Council for England.
The number of home-dwelling students first really began to rise in the nineties - the same decade as tuition fees were introduced, in 1998.
Passing on student accommodation is particularly common in London, where rents are famously high, and Scotland, where students go tuition fee-free.
Meanwhile, applicants in Wales, the south east and throughout the south west seem largely to stick with a traditional student room.
The most common reasons mentioned for living with the parents were saving money (64 per cent) and being near family (46 per cent), as per a survey of 1,000 UK students by Leeds Beckett University.
More than half (53 per cent), meanwhile, said it motivated them to consistently attend classes - perhaps with mum and dad there to keep them in line.
Ucas chief executive Jo Saxton pointed out some students stay at home as it is close to the best course or university for them or to caring and family responsibilities.
But the former school leader emphasised, generally speaking: 'More needs to be done to ensure the cost of living doesn't become a limit on young people's ambition.'
She added how this affects students often varies vastly depending on which part of the country they come from and study in.
For instance, Glasgow Caledonian University is the UK institution with the most students living at home, at a whopping nearly half (45 per cent) of its intake.
It is followed by SOAS University of London (44 per cent) and University of Wolverhampton, Birmingham City University and the University of Bradford (all 43 per cent).
Meanwhile, a mere one per cent of those at Oxford and Cambridge stay with their parents.
Many Oxbridge colleges offer an appealing lifestyle of ease, with three meals a day, room cleaning and in some cases, even a free laundry service.
Also down at the lower end are the University of Durham and Aberystwyth University, at 2 per cent, and the universities of Lancaster and St Andrew's, at 3 per cent.
More than half of the most disadvantaged students plan to live with their parents instead of in halls - compared to fewer than one in five of the most well-off.
Ucas plans to roll out a scholarships and bursaries tool next year to try to even out students' access to the monetary support they need.
Gabrielle Williamson, 26, lived with her parents in the town of Blantyre, around 15 miles away from Glasgow University, where she studied for six years, graduating in 2023.
Now a dentist, she said she stayed at home to save money but also to enjoy the homebody benefits of her mum making her meals and washing her clothes.
She said her parents had been upset at the thought of her potentially moving to Dundee for her degree.
And with friends in student accommodation she could crash in at the weekends, Ms Williamson did not feel she missed out.
A typical drive on a UK motorway in September might see drivers surrounded by cars stacked with pots, pans and duvets as freshers head to university for the first time.
Ucas strategy director Ben Jordan recalled his own drive to Cardiff University, 'with the bedding on the front seat of my Fiesta muffling Oasis's Definitely Maybe'.
But he emphasised it is likely far more students than we might think will not be driving across the country - but simply logging on to Zoom from home.
'This stereotypical view of a literal journey into higher education isn't the case for everyone', he said.
And it seems it can no longer be the baseline assumption.
Students now rate being 'close to home' as their fourth biggest priority, up from ninth a decade ago, a recent Ucas survey has shown.
Joel Gilvin, 23, lived with his parents in Mile End, east London, during his degree in finance and accounting at Birkbeck University, which he graduated from summer.
His family were not happy about this at first, with his dad especially wanting him to have the full digs experience, like he did after moving from Liverpool to Warwick.
But Mr Gilvin was put off by the downsides of independent student living - a maintenance loan to repay, tricky housemates, messy flats and high rents.
He admits he might have made friends and memories by living out.
But this actually encouraged him to make more of an active effort to do this back home, through his hobbies of playing guitar, piano and cello.
The student said he felt most of his fellow pupils were moving away from home simply for social life reasons - and that just was not enough to motivate him to do it.
Karly Nuttall, 23, lived with her parents in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, while she studied just over ten miles away, at the city centre's School of Journalism.
She had originally not intended to study in Manchester - with Covid and lockdown hitting and bringing the end of her social life any way, she thought she may as well.
And the student has no regrets - she loved her time living in Manchester.
Hari Gautama, 21, who is about to enter the final year of his chemistry degree at King's College London (KCL), lives with his parents in the northeast of the capital.
He had seen his sister pay an arm and a leg for student accommodation in the city - 'a very small space right by some train tracks in Vauxhall' - and he was put right off.
The student was concerned the basic maintenance loan would not cover this kind of rent.
And his life - friends, a band, the capital's vibrant music scene - was back in the capital, with his parents not fussed if he came back at 3am in order to live it.
The maximum maintenance loan - paid to those whose parents' household income is less than £25,000 - is £13,348.
This is less than the average annual student rent in London (£13,595), according to a report from student housing charity Unipol and the Higher Education Policy Institute.
And digs these days keep getting more and more luxe in both specification and price tag.
Garden Halls, for instance, which serves London universities like KCL, Goldsmith's and UCL, charges up to £1,675 a month for an en-suite room.
It also boasts tennis courts, landscaped gardens and catering.
Fusion Students, meanwhile, in the capital's Brent Cross area, charges up to £1,711 a month.
Communal facilities include a gym, basketball court, boxing and cardio studios, meditation area, karaoke room, recording studio, gaming zone, cinema and roof terrace.
But it seems living at home does not even stop beyond graduation day either.
The proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents has risen by more than a third in less than two decades, research from earlier this year found.
About 450,000 more young adults are now in the family home compared to 2006 - and it is especially evident among men and those in their late 20s.
The trend, like that with students, has been fuelled by rent and house price increases with young people moving home to save, according to the study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Those living with parents are more likely to have seen 'large declines in net wealth', it found - and move back in with mum and dad following breakups or redundancies.
This figure hit a peak of 21 per cent during Covid before falling back slightly after lockdown restrictions were eased.
Meanwhile, the share of 25 to 29-year-olds living at a parental home increased from 20 per cent to 28 per cent in the same time frame.
It suggests the age people traditionally flee the nest is rising.
Bee Boileau, a research economist at IFS, said: 'For some, living with parents provides an opportunity to build up savings more quickly than if they were renting - which is an especially valuable advantage in high-cost places like London.
'However, others are likely to be living at a parental home due to a bad shock of some kind - such as the end of a relationship or a redundancy - or simply because they cannot afford to live independently.'
Young people living with their parents would otherwise be paying £560 per month on average if privately renting, the study said - with this figure rising to £1,000 in London.
Some 14 per cent of young adults living with their parents saved more than £10,000 over a two-year period, equal to an additional £400 each month.
This rate is more than a third higher than similar young adults who are living in private rented accommodation.
Business appears to be booming at both the bank and the hotel of mum and dad.