Is Going to University Becoming Unaffordable?

With A Level results out this week, a fresh crop of students are poised to start at universities across the country. As always, UCAS is able to use its comprehensive database of UK HE applicants to analyse trends in areas like subject choice, the background of applicants and the types of university they are choosing.

One trend is particularly interesting from a lifelong learning perspective: the rise in the numbers of young people choosing to stay at home during their university years. Since 2007 this has more than doubled to 30% and in some areas such as Glasgow and London, has reached well over 40%. An entertaining piece in the Sunday Times (“Rise of the Stay-at-Home Student”, Louise Eccles & Joey D’Urso, 10^th Aug 2025) highlights the key benefits of this choice -  free rent, and 24/7 home catering services being the most prominent.

The reasons for the rise in stay-at-home students are primarily financial. A report out this week – “A Minimum Income Standard for Students”(HEPI/Loughborough University, Aug 2025) - shows how living costs are rapidly outpacing student maintenance funding. The researchers estimate that the annual cost of living for first year students at university is now over £21,000 – almost double the value of the maximum maintenance loans available - and the average cost of attending a university to complete a three year degree is £61,000 (£77,000 in London), so most students need between £6,000 to £11,000 a year to top maintenance loans up. If you don’t want to end up working 20 hours or more a week to supplement your income, then reducing costs by staying at home becomes the only option.

Does this matter? As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, authors of “The 100 Year Life” (Bloomsbury, 2020) argue, a longer life is potentially a wonderful gift for all of us, and an extended childhood with parents – as long as you get on with them - sounds like a thoroughly enjoyable experience. But the problem is that parents are effectively paying the costs of bed and board for their stay-at-homes, unless their children are able to contribute through part-time work. If you add in the three years of lost income while doing a degree this is a walloping big drain on family wealth. No wonder degree apprenticeships have proved so popular!

It’s therefore no surprise that those from low-income households view going to university as financially unattractive in the short term. The potential boost to lifetime income from the graduate earnings premium is far from certain, as it depends on what subjects you choose and whether there are graduate jobs readily available in your area, which is far from the case in “left behind” parts of England. Running up a big debt through student loans which will affect the amount of tax you pay for decades is not an attractive prospect. And that’s before the issue of the cost of living while doing a degree has to be faced. When your family is struggling to make ends meet the idea of spending £60,000 and on top of that ending up with a debt of over £50,000 before you start full time work is seen by many as a selfish and risky course of action.

The latest data from the DfE (31^st July 2025) shows progression to HE for 19 year olds who have been on Free School Meals stuck at just under 29%, a full 20% below their better-off peers. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds are far more likely to stay at home if they do a degree, but also far more likely to work part-time, as their struggling parents can’t subsidise their living costs. If the Government wants to make progress on widening access to higher education, the current fees and loans system is utterly unhelpful. Opening up new, less costly routes into higher education and promoting the benefits of a step-by-step, roll on/roll off approach to gaining higher level skills from Level 4 upwards, is a much more promising approach than trying to encourage more working class students into traditional three-year degrees.

This means moving from the current “single shot” model of education, where you get one chance to succeed or end up permanently consigned to a Twilight Zone of low paid, low skill, insecure jobs, to a Lifelong Learning model, where compulsory education is important, but doesn’t determine your prospects for the rest of your life. Whether you get top grades or don’t do particularly well, school education should be conceived and designed not just to provide young people with specific knowledge, but to foster the attitudes and skills needed to continue learning throughout adulthood.

In this vision, a young person may begin work with no more than a Level 2 or 3 qualification – still the norm in many sectors, such as Hospitality, Adult Care, Construction, Engineering – and progress further up the career ladder later on, perhaps from their twenties onwards. Using mechanisms such as the long-awaited Lifelong Learning Entitlement, they are able to afford to return to education, perhaps taking a Higher Technical Qualification at Level 4, and at a later stage, Level 5, then 6, and even beyond. Currently, the school system doesn’t encourage this, and neither does the university system, the student funding system, the careers system, or the employee rights system.

“Breaking the pernicious link between background and success will be a defining mission for Labour” declared the Labour Party election manifesto. There’s certainly plenty to do.