The degree is being outrun by the inheritance

The Resolution Foundation’s They’re coming home is forensic on housing, careful on income, and useful on wealth.

It’s also almost entirely not about higher education, but there is an important number in the document for those who work in or near a university in footnote five.

The figure the report puts in the body is arresting enough – the share of accepted 18-year-olds telling UCAS they intend to live at home while they study has climbed from 22 per cent to 31 per cent over the last decade, so nearly a third of new entrants now plan to commute rather than move.

But the footnote hanging off that sentence breaks the number down by deprivation, and the gap is enormous:

In the most deprived neighbourhoods, most 18-year-olds (52 per cent) plan on living at home; in the least-deprived, it is less than a fifth (18 per cent).

A majority of the poorest new entrants now intend to stay put, against fewer than one in five of the most affluent. The move-away, halls-in-first-year, find-your-people-in-a-new-city model isn’t the norm that a disadvantaged minority can’t access – it’s increasingly the luxury version, sorted by postcode, while the box-room-and-a-bus-pass version is becoming the default route through higher education for everyone the access agenda is supposed to be reaching.

They never left

The report’s title captures the return-to-the-nest framing for graduates and twenty-somethings priced out of renting.

But for the most deprived students the framing is wrong, because there was never a leaving story to begin with – they’re not coming home, they never moved out, and the report’s own numbers say that’s now the experience of more than half of them.

We’ve run a whole series on commuter students and the way in which institutions built physically, socially and culturally around residential study are structurally configured to under-serve the students it wants to recruit.

None of that is the Resolution Foundation’s argument – the briefing is fundamentally about housing economics, not belonging or engagement – but it’s the unavoidable HE implication of a 52-to-18 split, and popping it under “interesting context” would be a category error.

Gaining ground, losing ground

The other place students surface is in the graduate-versus-non-graduate breakdown of who lives at home, and the headline reassurance – a degree does buy you more independence – turns out to be remarkably thin.

Among 20–24-year-olds, 55 per cent of graduates live with their parents against 67 per cent of non-graduates, and among 25–29-year-olds it’s 19 per cent against 29 per cent, so the credential compresses the stay-at-home rate by only ten to twelve percentage points.

The same document shows home ownership now tracking parental wealth and childhood tenure far more tightly than personal earnings – young adults raised in rented homes are half as likely to own as those raised by owner-occupiers.

Set the increasingly modest graduate premium on independence against an asset gradient that powerful, and the inference is obvious – the degree is being outrun by the inheritance.

That’s when higher education becomes one more thing alongside deposits and cash gifts that affluent parents buy for their children:

Children of wealthy parents receive more higher education, earn more, save more and receive vastly more in financial gifts.

Family income

The cheerful top line of the briefing is that cohort-on-cohort income progress, which broke for those born in the 1980s, has come back for the 1990s cohorts.

But the report decomposes where that progress actually comes from, and the answer for younger adults is sobering – of the rise in household income for 20–29-year-olds over the last decade, roughly half comes not from the young person at all but from other people under the same roof.

Narrow it to the early twenties and it stops being a quibble and becomes the whole story, because for 20–24-year-olds just 10 per cent of the apparent income progress is their own, while 86 per cent belongs to the rest of the household.

So an optimistic “generational progress has returned” line, for the under-25s, is overwhelmingly a measurement of their parents’ incomes, and students are identified as part of the reason it reads that way.

The consequence is deeply uncomfortable for a sector that has sold participation on social mobility, because it means any read on whether students are “doing fine” that leans on household income – which is most of them, including a good deal of access and participation measurement – is now mainly reading parental subsidy rather than student circumstance.

A measure that counts what mum and dad earn as evidence that the student is thriving isn’t a neutral technical choice when more than half the cohort lives at home.

No place like home

All of which makes the politics the report gestures at bit surreal. It cites the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats – with their February plan to “fix the student finance system and support graduates” – and the Greens as evidence that politicians are finally alive to generational unfairness, and a cross-party bidding war on loans, fees and graduate sweeteners has played out throughout 2026.

But the mechanisms the report’s own analysis fingers as driving young people’s living standards are the cost of housing, the level of the minimum wage, and the size of the parental wealth transfer, while the loan-and-fee tweaks the parties are competing over touch precisely none of them.

Nothing says a serious response to a housing-driven sorting of who gets the full university experience quite like another adjustment to the graduate repayment threshold.

Full-time

The bigger question for the people who determine policy on access and participation is whether the next round of plans treats home-based study as the thing that now defines disadvantaged participation – with everything that implies for belonging, travel, timetabling, and so on.

That doesn’t mean “recruiting more locals”, although in many universities that would help, and nor does it involve lazy nonsense like “they don’t need friends”. It does mean root and branch change – both inside universities and across government – to what we think a student is, and what “full-time” participation means.

Most of all, however reassuring IFS’ report is today on the graduate premium, it’s not long before it will become a rounding error for social mobility in comparison to the other factors.