The average student has just 50p a week left to live off after paying rent out of their student loans, a report has found.
Analysis of the cost of renting student bedrooms in ten key university cities has found that rents rose by nearly £1,000 last year, and now swallow up an entire maintenance loan.
The study, by the Higher Education Policy Institute and the student housing provider Unipol, found that rent for student bedrooms in England has risen to a national average of £7,566 a year. An average maintenance loan is £7,590 a year, leaving students with just £24 for the year to live on — equivalent to barely 50p a week.
It means students must rely on part-time work or help from their parents to afford to study at university.
Some students were taking desperate measures such as illegally doubling up on bedrooms in their accommodation, Unipol said.
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The value of maintenance loans has fallen far behind inflation, and even further behind rents. This year, loan values rose by just 2.8 per cent while inflation sat at above 10 per cent.
The cities in the analysis were Bournemouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Portsmouth and Sheffield. London and Edinburgh were deliberately excluded to give a more balanced view of rents outside these expensive markets.
In some cities, rents have risen by as much as 20 per cent since 2021. In Glasgow, the cost of accommodation rose by 20.4 per cent to £7,548 per year, while in Exeter student housing costs rose 16.1 per cent in the same period to £8,559.
The report also found that rents for private student accommodation, which is relied upon by universities to fill shortages of places in halls, has risen more steeply than rent for those owned by universities.
Private halls cost on average 19 per cent more than they did two years ago, while rents for university-owned bedrooms have gone up by 10 per cent.
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In Glasgow, which has been hit by a particularly sharp accommodation shortage, private prices have gone up 32 per cent in the period.
Loans should be more accurately described as a “contribution to living costs” to reflect how little they cover, the report suggested.
It said: “The importance of the parental contribution should be highlighted rather than just mentioned in passing and parents should be provided with clearer official information on the minimum they are expected to contribute.”
Victoria Tolmie-Loverseed, the assistant chief executive of Unipol, said that the figures showed housing costs for students had reached a “crisis point”.
She said: “With rents consuming unhealthy levels of an average maintenance loan, students are being forced to take desperate measures — illegally doubling up in rooms, taking on increasing amounts of paid work or even avoiding university altogether due to costs.
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Failing to address the student housing crisis risks undermining decades of progress in widening participation in higher education.
“We risk excluding those from poorer backgrounds, forcing middle-income students to take on unsustainable debts, and damaging the student experience for all.”
Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said the government needed to increase maintenance support in line with inflation at a minimum, and go further by re-evaluating the methods it uses to calculate support for students.
He warned the government must also act to fix the shortage of student housing, which this year has forced students to live more than an hour away from campus or defer their studies altogether.
Separately, the university admissions service Ucas said that the number of 18-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds in the UK who applied to the most selective universities and courses was the highest on record.
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A total of 3,160 had applied for higher education courses with an early October deadline including medicine, dentistry, and veterinary degrees, as well as for all courses at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.
This was up by 7 per cent from the same time last year.
