Cost of living: Life on the breadline

Students and academics are struggling to make ends meet during the economic crisis

Ellis Moloney should have been preoccupied with fieldwork and thesis deadlines this August. Instead, with inflation hovering around a 40-year high, the PhD student was more worried about how he would pay his share of the rent, let alone buy enough food with his £15,285-a-year university stipend. 

“I was living on the breadline, although I wouldn’t call it ‘living’,” says Moloney, a doctoral student in biological and marine science at the University of Plymouth.