Higher education and spatial (im)mobility: nontraditional students and living at home

I investigate the mobility decisions of students going into higher education in the UK, and look particularly at the circumstances under which students in one higher education market chose to live at home and their experiences of attending a local university. As more young people from nontraditional backgrounds are encouraged to participate in higher education, and as the financial costs of attending are increasingly borne by students and their families, more students are choosing to stay at home for financial reasons. I explore the advantages and disadvantages of students' decisions to live at home in the context of normative debates which stress the value of spatial mobility to the student lifestyle. While the evidence supports the argument that living at home is an economically rational decision for students from nontraditional backgrounds, it is also steeped in young peoples' emotional attachments to locally based networks of family and friends. Further, the connections between living at home and social and educational disadvantage amongst university students are investigated. The analysis shows that disadvantage is not associated with living at home per se, but is related to students' patterns of working, studying, and commuting.