The new academic year is approaching, and with it comes depressingly familiar news for those hoping to enter third-level education or to continue their studies. Most of the State’s leading universities have raised on-campus rents again, several of them by the largest margin the law allows.
University of Galway and Maynooth both pushed increases to within a whisker of the 2 per cent ceiling, while an en suite room in UCD’s Village 3 will cost just under € 12,000 for the year, comfortably the dearest campus bed in the country. Even the cheapest shared room on that same campus now approaches € 5,800. For families weighing the total cost of a degree, these sums are often a multiple of the fees they will pay for tuition.
Universities plead necessity, and there is some truth in that. Energy, maintenance and staffing costs have climbed, and institutions starved of core funding for years have few places to turn. Yet the effect is that students, among the least able to afford rising prices, are asked to underwrite the shortfall.
Under the terms of the Government’s Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, which came into effect in March of this year, rent is now capped nationally. But the charges layered on top are not. Maynooth, for example, has lifted its annual service and utility charge from ¤650 to ¤700, an increase of more than 7 per cent.
RM Block
This practice is addressed in a Bill launched last week by Labour Party Senator Laura Harmon, which would require these mandatory charges to be included in the advertised rent and therefore be subject to the cap. The Bill grew directly from a dispute over similar fees at DCU last year, and it deserves to progress. It remains to be seen whether it receives support from the Government, which flagged the same loophole a year ago and then did little about it.
Behind the cost problem lies the deeper failure of supply. The accommodation strategy published earlier this year sets a target of 42,000 beds by 2035. But not one extra bed will be ready this September, and few for several years thereafter. A student entering first year this autumn will have graduated well before the strategy delivers in any meaningful volume.
That is the bleak reality confronting anyone bound for third level in the next few years, and student representatives are right to identify the shortage as the single biggest obstacle to entering and finishing a degree.
As offers are issued in the coming days and term draws closer, the well-worn stories of scarcity, scams and impossibly long commutes will surface once more. Legislation may well curb some of the worst overcharging excesses. But the scarcity itself will outlast this cohort of undergraduates entirely.
