LIVING ON CAMPUS

A spokesperson for the UWI Students’ Guild told Newsday that off-campus rents had increased by as much as 40 percent; that there should be an investigation into high rents; and that the Government should intervene and provide “protection” for students who were “forced” to live off-campus.

We hope these statements do not reflect the general intellectual capacity or attitude of UWI’s student populace. In the first place, rents in the St Augustine area are high for a very simple reason: accommodation is scarce and students are plentiful. If rents have indeed increased by 40 percent, then this is because that is the price dictated by the market forces in that area. Besides, that 40 percent, even if accurate, is misleading. A single room that costs $1,000 rent may indeed have increased to $1,400, but a double room for $700 would have gone up to $1,000, which means that each person would now be paying 20 percent more. And the increase is similarly shared for accommodations for four or five persons where there is one overall rent.

In the second place, rents are constrained by specific factors. If they rise so high that it is cheaper and more convenient for students to travel from their homes to campus every day, then landlords will lose renters. This also points up the absurdity of claiming that students are “forced” to live off-campus.

Moreover, since the St Augustine and Curepe area has the highest number of rental spaces per square kilometre in the entire country, there is significant competition amongst landlords. It is not very intense, because of the over-supply of students who are willing to pay the rents demanded. But it does mean that accommodations range from the relatively luxurious to the relatively penurious, to meet varying demands.

Moreover, rents even within this area are also constrained by what landlords might charge in Tacarigua or Mount Hope, where students will pay less than those within walking distance of campus. So it is foolish to call for an investigation into high rents (although the authorities should certainly investigate the renovations made to people’s homes to ensure that they meet proper building codes).

Finally, we are not clear on what the Guild spokesperson means by Government providing “protection” to students. If she is suggesting that the Government subsidise the rents of students living off-campus, then she is in essence saying that taxpayers should help pay the rents of persons who come mostly from middle- and upper-middle class backgrounds. Given that taxpayers already pay the fees of students attending the university, this suggestion is rather unreasonable.

It seems to us that this particular protest is rooted in an attitude that wants everything to come easy. The students at UWI, for the most part, are the lucky seven percent who have been given an opportunity to pursue higher education at the premier institution in the Anglophone Caribbean. But, save for the minority amongst this minority, achieving that goal entails sacrifice, financial and otherwise. And even those sacrifices last only three to four years. So perhaps these UWI students would do better to count their blessings, instead of griping about what, in the wider scheme of things, are essentially trivial matters.