‘It gives the impression they don’t care’: Students impacted by Glasgow Uni’s housing crisis

Among the students impacted are those from Ukraine

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Multiple first-year and foreign students have been telling their story of how The University of Glasgow has rescinded their guarantee to accommodate them.

Over the last few years the amalgamation of dealing with the pandemic and COP-26 has led the university’s capacity to accommodate students to decline. Moreover, the university has just simply accepted too many students.

The first person we spoke to was student Alyssa. She said that on Tuesday 9th of August, “they emailed everyone and basically said that the demand is far exceeding availability so they can’t guarantee it anymore”.

Alyssa also mentioned that studying at her dream university looks like “it won’t be possible” and that “it’s odd the way they’ve handled it because surely they would know how many applications they had received so would have seen this coming before now”.

Renting university accommodation, student accommodation and or private accommodation has become exponentially competitive and expensive for prospective students of Glasgow University. This has made it all the more difficult for those who got their offer for guaranteed housing withdrawn days before university starts, the same students who worked hard to get their offers accepted by the Russel Group university.

All the more devastating to see is that students from Ukraine who wish to escape the war and fulfil their goals of higher education are prevented from doing so due to Glasgow Uni backing out on their promise.

With enrolment happening this week, students are panicking over where they will live and if they can attend the university after having rejected others.

“It leaves me considering going into clearing and choosing a different Uni as I can’t risk not getting a place anywhere,” another student told us. Despite having applied to university accommodation months prior, all students were told they have no place to live in a week before results and enrolment week “even though (the university) had guaranteed it if we applied before a July 14 deadline”. This gave the student the impression that the university doesn’t seem to “care about students enough to even give them a straight answer whether they’ll have accommodation or not”.

The real question is…why in the history of Glasgow University is the institute promising first-years and international students a place to live, only to take that away from them right before the academic year begins?

The University of Glasgow is one of the best universities in the UK and is well know for how friendly and welcoming it is by accepting people of all ages from all over the world; nevertheless, it has failed in the duty to provide pupils with a safe lodging in an unknown city and worst of all, it has made students who are paying an abundance of money for the institute question how much it cares for them to have given them false hope.

The University of Glasgow was contacted for comment.

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