Unless a student is fortunate to live near a city like Orange which has an excellent university and chooses a degree offered in their home town, the family is probably looking at more than $200 a week in accommodation costs alone.

If that child is following in the footsteps of sibling at university the weekly accommodation bill could be $400 to $500.

It is a cost which tens of thousands of parents in metropolitan areas with university students living at home simply don’t have to bear.

This cost is one of the reasons that HSC graduates from regional Australia are far less likely to go on to tertiary education and the employment benefits that brings them and yet it is a problem successive federal governments have been reluctant to deal with.

There are remedies which would make tertiary education as affordable for regional students as it is for students in metropolitan areas but they come at a cost which MPs representing regional Australia seem not prepared to mention.

With the Nationals now part of a Coalition government which could be looking at this inequity voters might well ask when they will find a voice.

One academic has suggested offering an extension to higher education contribution scheme (HECS) to cover accommodation as the simplest way to remove the financial barrier.

However this line-of-credit solution for accommodation, food and other expenses regional students face would make their HECS debt huge and perhaps discourage even more.

A simpler, fairer but more costly option would be to totally overhaul the eligibility rules for youth allowance as they apply to full-time students from regional areas relocating for tertiary study.

Until this happens there is no point in our political representatives lamenting the educational opportunities students from regional areas are missing.