Utrecht University will advise international students who want to come to the city this summer to reconsider their enrollment at the university if they have not yet found a room. “With a heavy heart, because international talent is important for our research and education,” says Lenn Lamkin, policy advisor student housing at the university.
According to the university, students who come to Utrecht without a room can end up in “undesirable and stressful situations”. International students often have no network, which means that they end up in expensive hotel rooms, for example. That is “not what we wish for our students”, according to Lamkin.
At the start of the previous academic year, more than 26,000 students had not yet found a room, knowledge center Kences reported at the time. That is why, for example, the University of Twente called on international students who could not find a room to consider studying elsewhere. In the coming years, the number of students seeking accommodation will increase further, mainly due to the higher influx of international students, according to Kences last year.
The number of new student housing is lagging behind demand, which means that the shortage of rooms will rise sharply. Utrecht University will announce on Thursday that it will offer 200 extra rooms with priority to international students, on top of the 950 rooms that are already reserved for foreign students. However, the university already knows that it will not be enough. Lamkin: “There are too few rooms. And the proportion of international students is low in Utrecht compared to other universities, about 13 percent, but because we are a university with 37,000 students, we are still talking about a large number of students. ” The university “really does not want people to underestimate the situation and end up in a difficult position”.