Can You Afford to Study Here?

You probably already know that studying for a degree full-time is expensive and so you need to get the best value for money you can.

Paying rent will probably be your largest monthly expense and many –  including Royal Holloway – see accommodation as a great money making opportunity.

It’s more than likely that Royal Holloway will provide a place for you in its purpose built student accommodation (PBSA), or ‘halls’, for your first academic year, so expect to budget approximately £8,000 – £9,000 to live in halls for 38 weeks.  After that, you will probably need to find a place in the community and pay rent at the going market rate.

Egham is a small town with a population of about 26,000 (including Englefield Green) and yet Royal Holloway aspires to increase its student numbers to 15,000: where, exactly, they are going to stay has now become a point of contention in the local community.

Several years ago, Royal Holloway proposed to build a ‘student village’ on a piece of land that it purchased adjacent to the sports fields but failed to develop the site: the plan has now been shelved, for reasons that the Senior Leadership Team describe as a change in ‘the external financial landscape’.

Meanwhile, Royal Holloway has also closed its site at Kingswood Hall with the loss of over 400 beds thus putting further pressure on local accommodation and left students asking questions about pricing with supply and demand issues.

To help meet this demand, many private individuals have bought up family homes in the town and converted them to HMOs to rent to students, building further tension in the community over socio-economic issues with family housing being lost, a fall in the number of children living here and the local junior school becoming economically unviable.  However, this may or may not concern you.

This article though:

https://nolettinggo.co.uk/blog/10-most-expensive-places-to-rent-in-uk

shows that Egham has become one of the most expensive places in the country to rent  and the third most profitable town for student landlords.  That should concern you.

It’s not just housing that is expensive here though.  Of the 8 priorities being campaigned on by the Royal Holloway Student Union for 2025-26, 4 of them relate to the financial pressures on Royal Holloway students:

Clearly, some of the costs that all students incur, such as electricity, gas and broadband, are fairly consistent throughout the country but the cost of rent varies enormously.  With Egham as one of the most expensive towns in the country though, it’s well worth looking at universities in other areas.

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