Apparently, students are “shunning university digs” for “home comforts”.
Setting aside the increasingly anachronistic use of the word “digs” to denote living away from home while at university, the story in the Times is a familiar one – it’s the idea that thanks to concerns about costs, where once students would flee the nest to go away to university, now they remain at home and commute to campus.
As well as comments from UCAS chief executive Clare Marchant on UCAS’s own research on student awareness of the realities of the experience, the story is underpinned by figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) which the Times says reveal that the gap between the number of students living at home and going away to university has narrowed to fewer than 100,000 – down from 250,000 in 2014-15.
