Most students settling in at university this autumn are worrying about seminars and exams, but Caitlin Ghibout, a second-year anthropology student at Durham, is angry about rents. Specifically, the fact that the high costs of college accommodation leave a student on the maximum maintenance loan just £1,270 to cover living costs for the year.

This autumn, in parallel with student activists across the country, Ghibout will be launching a Cut the Rent campaign. She wants to challenge her university over the fact that to make ends meet, lots of students are forced to work part-time or to ask their family for help.

“Rents have been rising significantly every year since 2010,” she says. “It’s got to the point where, if you were looking at which university to go to but didn’t have much money, you wouldn’t be able to come to Durham.”

A catered room in college costs £7,772. The maximum student maintenance loan for those with poorer families is £8,700 outside London, although the average is closer to £6,108. Ghibout, who receives the maximum maintenance loan for students from Scotland, says that without parental support she would have been unable to take her place at Durham.

Ghibout is part of a growing movement of student activists holding their universities to account for allowing rents to soar. According to the National Union of Students, rents accounted for 73% of the maximum student loan last year, compared with 58% in 2011-12. Since average annual rents are more than £6,000, a student receiving the average maintenance loan can scarcely cover this.

Students will be protesting on Thursday, part of a national day of action organised by Rent Strike, an activist network. The network, which grew out of campaigns at UCL and Goldsmiths in 2016-17, is now training students in activism and negotiation.

Clementine Boucher, a core activist at Rent Strike, says student campaigning is growing rapidly. The first rent campaign at UCL, launched in 2015, sparked five more campaigns at other universities in 2016. She estimates some 15 more will launch this autumn.

“Students have accumulated so much debt and their quality of life has deteriorated so much it was impossible not to notice,” she says. “They are really angry, frustrated and depressed by the situation. The group is building every year, so we are getting more campaigns, and more wins.”

Some student activists have already enjoyed success. At the end of last year, Liverpool University bowed to pressure about raising rents to an average of £158 a week after extensively refurbishing its accommodation. The university agreed to bursaries for the 25% of students with the lowest household income as of September this year.

According to Rory Hughes, the former student union president who led the campaign, the university’s accommodation was the most expensive in the country outside London – even though housing in Liverpool is comparatively cheap. “Living in halls would cost you twice as much a week as living in the private housing sector,” he says. “It’s almost all ensuite, it’s very hotel-esque, very swish accommodation.”

He said none of the available beds met the affordability criteria recommended by the National Union of Students: that every university should offer 25% of bed space at 50% of the maximum maintenance loan.

“We won the biggest cut in rent in the history of the student movement,” says Hughes. “It’s a million pounds a year to invest in making beds affordable for next four to five years.”

Boucher says Liverpool is not unusual. “It’s a stealth-like approach to take affordable accommodation and turn it into luxury halls, and students have no other option.”

Gavin Brown, a pro vice-chancellor at the University of Liverpool, says the university had a “constructive dialogue” with the student union over pricing. He says it can be difficult to strike a balance between what students say they want from housing and what they are able to pay for. “If you want something that’s very high quality, it involves significant investment,” he says.

Affordability has become such a problem that the government’s recent Augar review of post-18 funding and education warned of “widespread and significant concerns” about the cost of student accommodation. It recommended that universities work with the government and the regulator to monitor the costs, profit margins and quality of student housing.

At Rent Strike, while the fundamental goal is to bring back free higher education for students, Boucher says the group will settle for students having a greater say in their accommodation through student cooperatives. The idea is starting to take off: Student Co-Op Homes operates housing run and owned by students in Birmingham, Edinburgh and Sheffield and is looking to expand.

Eva Crossan, NUS vice-president for student welfare, is optimistic. “The movement has been very effective in starting that conversation about affordability, especially as a few years ago nobody was having it,” she says. “It’s been valuable in terms of pointing out that students are unhappy with incredibly expensive accommodation”

Meanwhile, Ghibout and her fellow campaigners at Durham want to be sure that enough of the profits from student accommodation are being spent on improving the standard of rooms, rather than on university expansion.

Durham University says it doesn’t hold information on the percentage of college fees spent on building improvements, but its pro vice-chancellor, Jeremy Cook, says rents “have been raised to reflect rising staff, utility, and building costs” and that over the next five years, the university will invest £56m on maintenance and refurbishment. He says students from the lowest-earning households can apply for a means-tested bursary scheme worth £2,000 a year.