Sir, – I read Wednesday’s front-page article (“Universities increase fees for student housing”, August 12th) with considerable concern.
As I argued in these pages earlier this year (January 9th), accommodation costs are increasingly determining who can afford to study, research and work in our universities.
Universities are educational institutions, not commercial landlords. Student accommodation should exist to make higher education accessible, not to generate revenue to plug gaps in university finances.
We should therefore oppose an approach that expects universities to become property businesses, using income from student rents to compensate for inadequate public funding.
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Affordable accommodation is now essential educational infrastructure. If Government is serious about equality of access to higher education – and about attracting and retaining the academics and researchers our universities need – it cannot simply leave accommodation to the market or expect universities to solve the problem commercially.
This is no longer solely a student issue. Lecturers, researchers and other university staff, particularly those at the beginning of their careers, can find that the cost of accommodation makes taking up a position in Dublin and other high-cost locations simply unaffordable. We are reaching a point where housing costs determine not only who can study in our universities, but who can afford to work in them. This will not serve the public good.
The solution is straightforward: properly fund our universities from public resources and develop a publicly supported system of genuinely affordable student accommodation.
Students should not be expected to finance an underfunded university system through their rents. – Yours, etc,
FRANK JONES,
General secretary,
Irish Federation of University Teachers.
