Living at home
Perhaps the cheapest and easiest alternative is to stay put. Ideally, without paying your parents anything for your room, food, heating and so on. Even if your parents do want or need you to chip in with the rent, what parents are going to offer a worse deal than the open market? (Apart from anything else, it’s bad business.)
Little things, like, perhaps, having home-cooked meals or being able to use the washing machine rather than visiting the university launderette, are not only a lot nicer and more convenient, but they also save you time and money. However, students living with their parents aren’t entitled to the same size student loans, more..
Having said that, unless their parents are more understanding than a multilingual shrink, students who choose to stay at home may miss out on a big chunk of the student experience. Many students won’t mind. Many will even be positively grateful. But if that’s not your idea of student life, then staying home will be a false economy.
Apart from anything else, you may be limiting your choice of universities if they have to be within daily tripping distance of home. That’s no problem if your local uni just happens to be ideal in every way, but if not, you should open up wider possibilities by considering moving out.
Many students who live at home do so not because they’re still waiting to cut the umbilical cord, but because they’ve got other things tying them to one place — family, kids, work, houses with mortgages and so on. As a rule (with so many exceptions that it must by now be proved), mature students tend to study locally for precisely these kinds of reasons. But then for mature students it’s rarely a case of staying with their parents anyway.
Last updated on: 21 May 2008