'The Student Waster is Dead' - exploring the emerging geographies of the 'stay at home' University student

Studies into the 'geographies of students' have become increasingly prevalent across the social sciences. There have been significant changes to Higher Education (HE) in the UK over the last 20 years, including growth in the number of students attending university and changes to funding. These have led to a radical reworking of the geographies of students and what is means to be a student (Holton and Riley 2013). One important trend that has gained recent press and popular attention is the rising number of University students electing to remain in their family home, with some suggesting Stay at Home University (SAHU) students now make up 25% of the student population (HESA 2017). As such, it has been suggested that the traditional 'boarding school' model of HE is being eroded, along with a more thoroughgoing transformation of HE participation as: "the age of the student waster is dead; the Millennial generation is one of soft drink consumers and long-suffering commuters" (Independent 2017). Despite this trend, the experiences of SAHU students, the extent to which they represent a new approach to being a student, and the impacts this has on their identity and wellbeing are poorly understood, for several reasons. First, the overwhelming focus within geographical literature on students has been on those who make the more conventional 'semipermanent' move to University (and the middle-class discourses commonly associated with this) (Holdsworth 2009). Second, where extant research on SAHU students exists it has focused on the initial decision to stay at home, rather than on actual experiences whilst at University. Alongside this, research has focused largely on the period before the recent steep rise in tuition fees. Third, recent research has suggested that the binary of move away/stay at home is too simplistic a depiction and fails to recognise nuanced blending of being home and away and the various scales of (im)mobility and local mobility performances that both SAHU and move away students may face (Holton and Finn, 2017; Finn 2017). The literature has thus far failed to recognise the importance of the experiences of students who live at home whilst at university. This study will be the first to develop a more holistic understanding of the experiences of SAHU students and will address four overarching research questions: 1) What are the experiences of SAHU students and how do their experiences change throughout their course of study? 2) How do University and Student Union policies and practices include or exclude (both explicitly and implicitly) SAHU students? 3) How do experiences of living at home (re)shape the different forms of capital students possess, develop and exchange across their course of study? 4) How, in light of these findings, might different Higher Education Institutions improve their provision for this increasingly prevalent mode of 'being a student'?