Susie, poised to leave the family nest and start life as a fully fledged student, is checking off items on a scrawled list: duvet, check; iPod, check; laptop, check; mobile phone charger...“Mum, do we need to make a trip to Habitat, to get some plates and mugs?” she yells down the stairs.

Her friend Mary, meanwhile, has not needed to pack up her bedroom to begin university life: in a bid to save money she has decided to carry on living with her parents throughout the three years of her science degree, snug in the room she last decorated as a 12-year-old schoolgirl.

Over the next few days hundreds of thousands of teenagers will begin their university days. As they make last-minute dashes to shops with their tearful mums for all those bits and bobs that are so-o-o essential, the latest figures show an increase in the numbers of youngsters preferring not to move out of their childhood homes.

With the average debt on graduating estimated at around £15,000, almost as many students are now living at home as in digs, a gap that has closed rapidly since the introduction of £3,000 tuition fees two years ago.

In 2004/5 255,000 lived in university accommodation compared to 198,500 in their parents’ homes; by last year the figure for those living at home had climbed to nearly 205,000.

Geoff Parks, the director of admissions at Cambridge University, has crunched several years worth of admission statistics and says they show that “huge numbers of students are now choosing to study near home”. It looks as though Britain may be moving towards continental patterns, which see youngsters living with their parents during their degree years, well into their twenties, sometimes even until they get married.

Nicola Stevens is one of the new generation. Despite starting a degree in fashion management at the University of Westminster in London last week, she is still living with her mum and dad in nearby Watford: driving daily back and forth to the university’s Harrow campus.

Already she is feeling alienated from the bustle of student life. “Everyone seems to have bonded over the weekend and is hyped up about starting uni but for me it’s still like going to school. I go every day and then I come back... People are going to the student union in the evening but I am not, because I am travelling home.”

Stevens, 18, is now considering moving into halls of residence in her second year. Nonetheless, she admits that coming home to her mum’s cooking has its advantages – even though her parents would have been happy to see their daughter living independently. “They think I will miss out by not moving away,” she explains.

Other parents think differently. For many the financial arguments for children staying put at home are compelling. Bona Boraliu, 18, says her estate agent mother tried “very hard” to dissuade her from accepting a place at a London School of Economics’ hall of residence this week. Instead she wanted her daughter to carry on living in the comfortable family house in west London “because it is so expensive to rent in the capital – around £6,000 a year”, says Boraliu.

Despite expecting to graduate with about £30,000 of debts at the end of her three-year degree, the teenager, who has been shopping for cushions and scarves to stamp her individuality on her study-room, was determined to strike out for “a taste of independence and a social scene” as well as the chance to make “lifelong friends”.

“You do not get to experience what university is really about if you live at home,” she says.

And as Boraliu acknowledges, her mother’s arguments were only partly about money worries. With her brother training abroad Boraliu’s departure will signal the last child flying the nest. “She will miss having me around. I am moving out – it’s a big step in my life – and in hers,” says Boraliu. “It’s a major point of separation when we go our own ways. She is finding that difficult.”

Millie Roy, 18, the youngest in a family of three children, anticipates that the “fights” she has had with her parents over moving into university rooms for her electronic engineering degree at Imperial College London, will be worth it.

“They said it was more cost effective to live at home in north London and they are right but I wanted the student experience... I have always led a sheltered life and this was the safest way to move out,” she says.

All those whose sons and daughters have moved out of the family nest but have opted for the local university can draw dubious comfort from the likelihood that their offspring are certain to pop back. “I’m only half an hour away,” says Boraliu. “If I’ve been eating loads of chips and beans I’ll be home to have a proper dinner.”

Roy agrees: “We are a big Asian family and we are always getting together. I’m thinking of nipping back with my laundry – the washing machines in college look like eating machines for money.”

In fact Roy is not too worried about making sure she packs everything she needs to start term this week. “It’s less than an hour to get home, I can always come and pick stuff up that I have forgotten,” she says.

So how do the parents left behind feel? The broadcaster Jenni Murray wrote movingly last year about clutching her strapping youngest son’s teddy and howling shortly after he left home. Was her life over just as his began, she mused.

Parents who have been through the empty-nest experience report that there are positive aspects. Stephanie Davis, a single mother whose daughter Abigail started last autumn at a university two hours’ drive away, says she pined for weeks after her daughter left. But when Abigail came back in the holidays, went clubbing and stayed out till 4am several mornings in a row Davis realised that she and her daughter were at very different stages in their lives and it was time to cut the apron strings for good.

Since then Davis has met a new man and been promoted at work. Which just goes to show that next month could be the start of a new life for parents as well as their offspring.

Some names have been changed

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