The Price of Independence
Why the traditional route into adulthood is becoming harder to afford
For generations there was a reasonably well understood route into adulthood.
You left education, found work, moved out, rented somewhere.
Eventually, perhaps with a partner, you bought a home.
It was never as straightforward as nostalgia suggests. Previous generations experienced recessions, unemployment, industrial decline, high interest rates and housing difficulties of their own. Plenty of people never went to university, and plenty never bought a house.
But the route was sufficiently familiar that we built much of our understanding of adulthood around it.
Leaving home meant independence.
Home ownership meant success.
Still living with your parents in your mid-twenties suggested something had gone wrong.
The problem is that we have retained those assumptions long after the economics supporting them began to change.
Young adults are increasingly being judged against milestones created for a different housing market, a different employment market and, for graduates, a very different system of higher education.
Perhaps the surprising thing is not that so many are still living at home.
It is that we continue to regard this as their failure.
Leaving home for university
For many young people, university traditionally provided the first major step away from the parental home.
University was never simply a collection of lectures followed by examinations.
For many 18-year-olds it meant arriving in an unfamiliar city with a suitcase, moving into a room surrounded by strangers and learning how to function without Mum or Dad immediately available.
You learned to budget.
You discovered whether you could cook.
You shared kitchens and bathrooms with people whose habits drove you mad.
You joined societies. Went for drinks. Stayed up talking until ridiculous hours. Fell in love. Fell out with people. Made mistakes.
You met people from different parts of the country, different social classes, different cultures and sometimes different countries.
Some students hated halls. Some became desperately homesick. Some had miserable experiences.
Living away from home never guaranteed happiness.
But it offered something beyond the qualification.
It offered a rehearsal for independent adulthood.
Increasingly, that experience itself has a price attached.
When the bedroom became an asset
There has been a transformation in university life that is easy to overlook.
The student bedroom has become an investment asset.
To an 18-year-old arriving with a suitcase, it may be the first bedroom they have ever occupied away from their parents.
To the investment industry, it is PBSA: purpose-built student accommodation.
Britain's professionally managed student accommodation market is now estimated to be worth almost £85 billion. Investors committed £4.3 billion to the sector during 2025 and another £2.1 billion during the first three months of 2026.
Those numbers are worth thinking about.
We tend to imagine student accommodation as halls of residence owned by universities, or perhaps the traditional landlord who owns several terraced houses near campus, like in The Young Ones.
That world still exists.
But alongside it is something very different.
Unite Students now operates around 71,000 beds following its acquisition of Empiric Student Property.
iQ Student Accommodation, with more than 30,000 beds, is owned through funds managed by Blackstone, one of the world's largest alternative investment managers.
Student Roost was acquired for approximately £3.4 billion by a joint venture between global property company Greystar and GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund.
Scape has attracted hundreds of millions of pounds of investment from APG, which invests pension money on behalf of millions of people in the Netherlands.
There is nothing inherently improper about any of this.
Buildings require capital. Pension funds need somewhere to invest. Investors expect returns. Without investment, many of these rooms might never have been built.
But something important has happened to the relationship between the student and the bedroom.
It is simultaneously somebody's first home and somebody else's investment return.
This phenomenon extends far beyond universities.
We have done something similar with housing. A house is somewhere to raise a family, but it is also an investment, a pension, an inheritance and an asset whose increasing value we routinely celebrate.
It has happened to football clubs, where institutions created by communities can become assets within international investment portfolios and multi-club ownership structures.
We have seen versions of it in privatised infrastructure and utilities, where something the public experiences as an essential service can simultaneously be viewed by investors as a collection of assets and future cash flows.
Increasingly, almost everything can become an investment.
The citizen sees a home.
The student sees a bedroom.
The supporter sees a football club.
The customer sees an essential service.
The investor sees an asset.
Those perspectives are not automatically incompatible.
The difficulty comes when the investment function begins to overwhelm the original purpose of the thing being invested in.
Student accommodation provides a particularly revealing example because the customer is unusual.
Many students have little income of their own. They are borrowing money from the state partly to support themselves while studying. Their parents may have to make up the difference. Living near their university can determine whether they participate fully in the social and educational experience they are supposedly purchasing.
Yet their accommodation sits within a market in which owners quite properly discuss occupancy, rental growth, yields, profitability and asset values.
The language is not sinister. It is simply the language of investment.
But compare it with the language of the student.
Can I afford the rent?
Will my maintenance loan cover it?
Will Mum and Dad have to help?
Can I afford to eat?
Would I be better staying at home?
Those are two completely different conversations about exactly the same bedroom.
In London, the collision has already become extraordinary.
Research by Unipol and HEPI found average annual student rent of £13,595 in 2024, exceeding the maximum maintenance loan then available.
Think about that.
A student could receive the maximum amount the state was prepared to lend them towards their living costs and find that the average rent alone consumed more than the entire amount.
Before food.
Before transport.
Before clothes.
Before going for a drink with the people they are supposed to be meeting at university.
Before living.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that students are beginning to make different choices.
When your postcode chooses your university
UCAS data shows that the proportion of applications from UK 18-year-olds declaring an intention to live at home has risen from 18 per cent in 2017 to 28.3 per cent in 2026.
This is not a marginal change in student behaviour.
While some young people undoubtedly prefer to remain at home, for others the calculation is straightforward.
Why spend thousands of pounds each year on accommodation when a train or bus can get you to university?
Financially, it can be an entirely rational decision.
But the choice is not distributed equally. In the latest completed admissions cycle, 52 per cent of 18-year-olds from the most disadvantaged areas intended to live at home, compared with just 17.9 per cent from the most advantaged areas.
So it changes something else.
Imagine two equally talented 18-year-olds.
One comes from a family able to support them financially.
They can consider universities across Britain. Manchester. Bristol. Newcastle. Exeter. Liverpool. Leeds.
They can ask which institution offers the best course, which city appeals to them and where they would most like to spend the next three years.
The other knows that moving away requires accommodation their family cannot afford to subsidise.
Their questions are different.
Which universities can I reach from home?
How much is the train? Is it reliable?
Can I get there for a nine o'clock lecture?
What time is the last one back?
Nobody has prevented either student from applying wherever they wish.
But only one really has a national marketplace from which to choose.
The other's choices may increasingly be determined by the railway lines surrounding their parents' house.
Both have access to higher education.
Only one has genuine freedom of choice.
The 5.30 train home
There is another cost that is harder to put on a spreadsheet.
The commuter student can sit in exactly the same lecture theatre as the student living in halls. They can receive the same teaching, submit the same assignments and eventually graduate with exactly the same degree.
But university does not stop when the lecture finishes.
At five o'clock one student may go back to their flat.
The other may need to catch the 5.30 train.
That can mean missing the spontaneous parts of university life.
The conversation after class.
The society meeting.
The drink that wasn't planned.
The invitation back to somebody's flat.
The friendships that develop simply because people spend time around one another.
The qualification may be identical.
The experience surrounding it isn't necessarily so.
I know something about the importance of that experience from what might seem an unlikely source.
The Open University.
The week distance learning stopped being distant
I studied with the Open University at a time when it was perfectly possible to study largely because you were interested in something.
Around 2008, I studied S283, Planetary Science and the Search for Life.
I remember it costing between £300 and £400 for the 30-credit Level 2 module. I no longer have an invoice from nearly twenty years ago, so I have always been careful to describe that figure as my recollection.
The same module lineage, in its final presentation in 2026, costs £2,044.
I wasn't studying planetary science because I had identified an exciting vacancy in the planetary science labour market.
I studied it because I found it fascinating.
That wasn't unusual for the OU student of the time.
In 2009, I attended SXR103, Practising Science, a week-long Open University residential school on a university campus in Brighton.
For one week, distance learning stopped being distant.
We carried out practical work together. We ate together. We socialised together. People who ordinarily studied alone in different parts of the country suddenly occupied the same physical space.
Most of us were not there because we had calculated how much additional lifetime income Practising Science might generate.
We were studying for fun.
Think about how strange that phrase can sound today.
We just wanted to know things.
I made friends there from different parts of Britain whom I remain in contact with today.
The Open University understood something that risks being lost when education is reduced to the transmission of course content.
There is value in bringing people together.
There is value in the conversation outside the lesson.
There is value in encountering people you would otherwise never have met.
There is value in friendship.
And this was a distance-learning university recognising it.
The Open University once brought distance students onto a campus because it recognised what studying remotely could otherwise miss: practical experience, social interaction and simply being around other students.
Today, the economics of higher education are increasingly sending conventional university students in the opposite direction.
Back home.
The Covid generation
That may matter particularly for the generation now arriving at university.
An 18-year-old beginning university in 2026 was around 12 when Britain entered its first Covid lockdown.
Part of their adolescence took place amid school closures, restrictions on social contact, cancelled activities and a huge migration of everyday interaction onto screens.
Covid did not single-handedly transform young people's social lives. Smartphones and social media were changing them long before 2020.
But there is an uncomfortable contradiction here.
We worry about loneliness.
We worry about excessive screen use.
We worry about whether online communication has displaced some face-to-face interaction.
Then, at precisely the same time, the cost of higher education encourages more young people to remove one of the great socialising experiences of early adulthood: leaving home and living among their peers.
For some, university might have provided a social reset.
Instead, some young people will experience university from the same bedroom in which they experienced lockdown.
That does not mean commuter students cannot flourish. Many will.
The important distinction is choice.
There is a profound difference between living at home because you want to and living at home because £200, £250 or £300 a week has removed the alternative.
One student has chosen their university experience.
The other's bank balance has chosen it for them.
What happened to the Open University?
All of this ought to create an extraordinary opportunity for the Open University.
If leaving home is unaffordable, why leave at all?
Stay home. Keep working if necessary. Avoid accommodation costs entirely. Study with an institution specifically created to bring higher education to people unable to follow the conventional route.
Study 60 or 90 points a year instead of 120 and allow the degree to take a little longer, without incurring the enormous living costs associated with moving away to attend a traditional university.
There is just one problem.
The Open University isn't the proposition it once was either.
It could occasionally feel rough around the edges when I studied there, but that was remarkably easy to forgive because this was a venerable institution doing something genuinely radical.
It gave working adults, parents, carers and people who had missed the conventional route opportunities that might otherwise not have existed at all.
And it did so at a price that allowed people to study subjects simply because they wanted to know about them.
That conception of education has become much harder to sustain.
Something I remember costing around £400 now costs more than £2,000. It would still be under £700 even allowing for inflation.
A current Open University astronomy and planetary science degree in England costs more than £24,000.
The Open University remains cheaper than most conventional universities, and avoiding accommodation can make the overall difference much larger.
But cheaper does not necessarily mean affordable.
The student provides the room, the computer and internet connection.
Only a handful of current Open University courses include a residential school.
At a few hundred pounds for a module, occasional rough edges could easily be forgiven as part of an extraordinary bargain.
At more than £2,000 for 30 credits, the relationship between student and institution inevitably changes.
Students are entitled to expect value for money.
This isn't an argument that the modern Open University is a bad university.
It is an argument that Britain could desperately use the proposition it once represented.
A genuinely affordable alternative for people who wanted to learn without purchasing the entire residential university experience.
Britain needs the Open University more than ever.
It needs the Open University that we used to have.
The marketplace that never arrived
When higher tuition fees arrived in 2012, one of the ideas was that universities would compete.
Some might charge the maximum.
Others might charge £7,000 or £6,000.
Students would compare price, quality and value.
Something resembling a marketplace would emerge.
Except the anticipated competition on price largely failed to materialise.
Given the opportunity to compete on price, most universities went to the same trough, overwhelmingly gravitating towards the maximum fee.
There were understandable reasons for that. Funding arrangements changed dramatically, and charging less could even risk signalling that an institution considered its product inferior.
But the student loan system also insulated the purchasing decision from the headline price.
An 18-year-old choosing between a £7,000 course and a £9,000 course wasn't normally being asked to produce either amount from their bank account.
Accommodation is different.
Rent is real now.
So is the food bill, the train fare and the amount Mum and Dad are being asked to contribute.
Ironically, the price competition that tuition loans helped suppress may finally be arriving by another route.
Rising accommodation and living costs are forcing students to ask the question that any functioning market ultimately depends upon:
Is this worth it?
Leaving home. Twice.
The calculation might still appear straightforward if the next stage remained secure.
Study hard.
Get the degree.
Graduate.
Get the graduate job.
Move out.
Build a career.
Save a deposit.
Buy a home.
But there are problems further along the route too.
The graduate labour market has become another source of anxiety. Some of the most dramatic claims about collapsing graduate vacancies need careful handling, particularly when they rely on vacancies advertised on individual recruitment platforms rather than the entire labour market.
But the broader uncertainty surrounding entry-level professional work is real enough to affect how young people calculate the value of what comes before it.
And so the modern university journey can look rather strange.
At 18, a young person decides that student accommodation is too expensive and remains with their parents.
Or perhaps they do leave, experience three years of independence and graduate.
Then they discover that an entry-level salary will not comfortably support private rent in the place where the best jobs are.
So they return home.
The childhood bedroom waits at both ends of the degree.
And then we ask why young adults aren't becoming independent.
There is something deeply contradictory about this.
Suppose a graduate can remain with their parents and save £600 or £800 every month towards a deposit.
What exactly would be more mature about handing that money to a landlord simply to demonstrate that they have moved out?
Privacy matters.
Independence matters.
Having your own space matters.
But so does arithmetic.
The property ladder
And eventually that young person is expected to buy.
Home ownership occupies a peculiar place in British culture.
A house is somewhere to live, but owning one has come to represent much more than shelter. It suggests security, independence, financial responsibility and success.
We even describe buying your first home as getting onto the property ladder.
The metaphor matters.
Ladders are things we climb. Progress is upwards. Those further up have succeeded. Those who remain at the bottom have not.
Homeowners have sometimes looked down upon renters.
This is where housing becomes part of the meritocracy argument.
We like to believe people progress because they work hard, make sensible choices and delay gratification.
Study hard. Get qualifications. Build a career. Save your money. Buy a house.
Then look back down the ladder and congratulate yourself for climbing it.
But that assumes everybody had roughly the same ladder.
They didn't.
And for those coming behind, the first rung has moved increasingly out of reach.
The average UK house price stood at around £157,000 in June 2012. By June 2026 it was around £272,000. That is an increase of approximately 74 per cent.
The significance of 2012 goes beyond housing. It was also the year the new higher university tuition fee regime began.
A generation entering adulthood under substantially higher university fees therefore encountered another enormous change at almost exactly the same time: the asset we continued telling them represented successful adulthood became substantially more expensive too.
Education became more expensive.
Housing became more expensive.
But our definition of successful adulthood barely changed.
The inheritance of independence
Even then, the price is not the same for everyone.
Imagine two graduates of the same age.
They attended similar universities, achieved similar degrees and secured jobs on identical salaries.
One returns home to parents who ask for little or no board. They can save a substantial part of their salary. Perhaps their parents will eventually contribute towards a deposit.
The other returns to a household where money is already tight. They need to contribute towards the bills. Perhaps their parents rent rather than own. Perhaps there are younger siblings to support. There will be no deposit arriving from the Bank of Mum and Dad.
Neither graduate has worked harder.
Neither has demonstrated greater talent.
Yet within a few years their financial lives can look completely different.
One buys a home and begins accumulating equity. The other continues renting, saving or living with their parents.
We then look at the first and say they have "done well for themselves".
There is nothing wrong with parents helping their children. Most parents who can help understandably will.
The problem comes when we confuse inherited advantage with individual achievement.
Housing makes that particularly powerful because the advantage compounds.
One person's monthly housing payment gradually purchases an asset.
Another person's rent helps purchase an asset for somebody else.
The first property may increase in value. Its equity can help finance another move. Eventually some of that accumulated wealth may itself pass to the next generation.
Independence begins to reproduce itself.
So does disadvantage.
And if housing becomes increasingly dependent upon parental assistance, independence itself begins to depend upon your parents.
That is a strange definition of independence.
The mortgage that follows you into retirement
Getting onto the property ladder does not necessarily end the affordability problem.
Increasingly, it may simply move it further into the future.
The average first-time buyer is now approaching 33. At the same time, mortgage terms have been getting longer. By March 2025, the average first-time buyer mortgage term had reached 31 years, compared with 28 years a decade earlier. An increasing proportion of first-time buyers are taking mortgage terms longer than 35 years, with 40-year mortgages increasingly common.
The arithmetic is straightforward.
Take out a 35-year mortgage at 33 and, if it runs its full term, you will still be paying it at 68.
Take out a 40-year mortgage and you reach 73.
For increasing numbers of borrowers, the mortgage no longer ends comfortably before retirement. It follows them towards it, and even into it.
Longer terms make sense. They reduce the monthly payment and may be precisely what makes buying possible.
But they do so by extending the debt.
Consider a purely illustrative £200,000 repayment mortgage at 4.5 per cent.
Over 25 years, the monthly payment would be around £1,112. Stretch the same loan to 40 years and it falls to around £899.
That £213 difference might be what allows somebody to buy.
But if both mortgages ran for their full terms at that rate, the 25-year borrower would pay around £133,500 in interest. The 40-year borrower would pay around £231,600.
Today's affordability has simply been borrowed from tomorrow.
And tomorrow is also when we tell people they should be preparing for retirement.
Young adults are routinely encouraged to start pension saving early, increase their contributions and take advantage of decades of compound growth.
That is perfectly sensible advice.
But money can only be spent once.
The same pound cannot pay the mortgage and go into the pension.
Auto-enrolment means many people will contribute to a workplace pension while paying a mortgage. The more difficult question is whether they will have enough disposable income to contribute substantially beyond the minimum while simultaneously servicing housing debt into their sixties or seventies.
For previous generations, clearing the mortgage could create a valuable period before retirement when money previously spent on housing became available for pensions, savings or simply reducing working hours.
What happens when the mortgage itself approaches retirement?
We have solved one affordability problem by extending the period over which it must be paid.
The price of buying later may ultimately be retiring later too.
What is wrong with Gen Z?
There has been no shortage of commentary about Generation Z.
They are supposedly pessimistic, expect too much and don't want to work hard enough.
They have become disillusioned with capitalism.
They don't believe they will enjoy the lives their parents enjoyed.
Some of those claims may raise legitimate questions about changing attitudes.
But perhaps we should ask another one.
What if some of their pessimism is rational?
Tell an 18-year-old that the route to success is to study hard and go to university.
Show them the tuition cost.
Show them the accommodation cost.
Show them the eventual student loan balance.
Show them the graduate employment market.
Show them private rents.
Show them the deposit required to buy a modest home.
Then tell them that if they work hard enough, everything should work out.
At what point does scepticism stop being entitlement and start becoming numeracy?
This does not need to become another generational war.
Someone buying a house in the early 1980s might have faced mortgage interest rates unimaginable to a recent generation. Someone leaving school in an area devastated by industrial decline did not stroll effortlessly into prosperity.
Previous generations faced serious economic problems of their own.
The question isn't:
Who had it hardest?
It is:
Does a young person starting today have the same realistic route into independent adulthood that we still expect them to follow?
If the route has changed, character alone cannot explain why the destination has changed too.
The university has a problem too
There is another consequence.
If increasing numbers of young people conclude that the traditional residential university model is unaffordable, universities themselves will eventually have to respond.
Some students will commute.
Some will choose distance learning.
Some will pursue apprenticeships and other routes.
Some may decide that university is no longer worth the total cost.
This is happening while universities themselves are already under substantial financial pressure. More than a third of institutions reported deficits in 2024/25, while the Office for Students estimates that, without mitigating action, more than four in ten could report deficits in 2025/26.
The market competition that universities largely avoided when tuition fees rose may therefore arrive in a much less comfortable form, and not because institutions suddenly decide to compete by cutting fees.
But because their potential customers decide they cannot afford the overall product.
That does not mean universities are about to disappear.
It does mean the assumption that an ever-expanding number of young people will pay an ever-increasing total price for the traditional three-year residential degree deserves questioning.
And employers may eventually have to question something too.
If fewer young people decide university is worth the cost, businesses cannot continue indefinitely treating a degree as the default entry ticket for jobs that never inherently required one.
The consequences travel through the system.
Education affects employment.
Employment affects housing.
Housing affects independence.
None of them really exists in isolation.
And then there is AGI
Another disruption sits just beyond this article.
We do not need to predict the arrival of artificial general intelligence to recognise that AI can already perform some of the routine research, writing, analysis and administrative work traditionally given to junior white-collar employees.
Those jobs do more than complete junior tasks.
They train future senior employees.
Today's trainee becomes tomorrow's expert.
If employers eventually need fewer inexperienced people, another question follows:
Where do tomorrow's experienced people come from?
That deserves an article of its own.
For now, it is enough to recognise that the route from education into employment is being disrupted at exactly the same time as the route from employment into independent housing.
The price of independence
Put everything together and the familiar complaint about young adults refusing to grow up starts to look rather different.
The young person is told to become educated. Education has become more expensive.
They are told university will broaden their horizons. The accommodation required to experience it fully may cost thousands of pounds a year.
They are told to become independent. Private rent may consume a substantial part of their early-career income.
They are told to save for a house. House prices have risen dramatically.
They are told success comes from hard work. But hard work does not determine the price of the things they are working towards.
Parental wealth can determine whether they can study away from home, how quickly they can save and whether a deposit arrives when they need one.
And increasingly, some of the things standing between them and independence are also assets from which somebody else requires a return.
The student bedroom.
The rented flat.
The eventual house.
That does not make investment wrong.
It does mean we should notice what happens when the things required to build an independent life simultaneously become increasingly valuable investment assets.
The price of independence is not paid equally.
Perhaps they haven't failed to grow up
Individual responsibility still matters.
Some young people spend too much. So do some older people.
Some make poor decisions. So do older people.
Some could afford to leave home and simply prefer not to.
The same has been true of every generation.
But individual failings cannot adequately explain population-level changes in behaviour when the economic environment surrounding that population has changed too.
A 25-year-old living in their childhood bedroom may have a degree, a full-time job, savings and may desperately want a place of their own.
Remaining at home may be precisely how they are trying to obtain one.
That isn't necessarily a failure of adulthood.
It may be adulthood adapted to a different economy.
In Could Rita Afford to Be Educated Today?, I asked what happens when education becomes something that increasingly has to be justified as a financial investment.
In The Myth of Meritocracy: Who Is Allowed to Succeed?, I asked whether we can genuinely describe outcomes as meritocratic when people begin with profoundly different resources and opportunities.
Accommodation brings those questions together.
The affluent student can choose where to study.
Their parents can help fund the residential experience.
They can return home afterwards without contributing much towards household expenses.
They can save.
Their parents may help with a deposit.
They buy.
Their property appreciates.
Another young person can work every bit as hard and make every bit as many sensible decisions without following the same trajectory.
Years later, we may look at the homeowner and conclude that they succeeded.
Then look at the other person still living with their parents and wonder where they went wrong.
Perhaps they didn't.
We criticise young people for remaining dependent on their parents while simultaneously constructing an economy that increasingly makes leaving their parents unaffordable.
Then we wonder why they are pessimistic about the future.
For years we have asked:
Why haven't they left home yet?
Perhaps we have been asking the wrong people to explain themselves.
The better question is:
What happened to the economy that once allowed them to?
And if education, employment and housing continue moving in their current directions, there is a larger question waiting behind it.
What are we going to replace that route into adulthood with?
References
Sources and Notes: The Price of Independence
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About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.