More and more students give up hope of finding a room

Eight years ago 52 per cent of all students (university and university of applied sciences) lived away from home and a further 7 per cent wanted to move out: that is 59 per cent in total. Today only 44 per cent live away from home, while only 5 per cent are looking for a room. That is 49 per cent together.

So much less than eight years ago. Students are giving up hope of finding suitable accommodation, concludes Kences, the knowledge centre for student housing.

The housing shortage undermines access to education, says director Jolan de Bie of Kences. After all, sometimes the course you want is too far away to continue living at your parents’ house. What do you do then, if you cannot find a room?

She also fears that students who live at home miss out on part of the social and emotional development “that is crucial for young people at this stage of life”. These students may feel partly excluded from student life, which could in turn lead to lower self-esteem, De Bie says.

There are several reasons for the shortage. About five thousand student rooms were added in the past year, but things went wrong in the private market. The number of students in privately rented housing has fallen by 17,800.

All kinds of organisations are sounding the alarm: new government laws and rules protect tenants against excessive rents and make homeowners pay more tax. As a result, many homeowners are putting their student houses up for sale.

The nineteen student cities have a total of around 322,400 student rooms. That is an estimated 13,500 fewer than in the 2023-2024 academic year.

In five of the nineteen student cities the housing shortage among students is not so bad. These are Arnhem, Ede, Enschede, Leeuwarden and Tilburg. In the other cities the pressure is, according to the monitor, high or even very high.

The researchers also looked at where the supply of student accommodation is ‘structural’, in other words: in which cities do students live in rooms that are permanently intended for students, and where do they live by chance in housing that next time may go to someone else or even disappear? The latter is what the researchers call the ‘flexible’ supply.

In The Hague, Amsterdam and Den Bosch that flexible supply is larger than the structural supply. In Rotterdam it is exactly half, and in the rest of the cities the structural supply is larger. A stable supply makes students less vulnerable, as the monitor’s authors note.

The housing shortage among students is also connected to the arrival of international students. Director De Bie warns that recruiting foreign talent will be harder if these students cannot find a room. “Our neighbouring countries can often guarantee this housing, meaning the Netherlands is becoming an increasingly poor competitor”, she says.

Some political parties see the solution in reducing the number of international students. But critics argue that in the long term this is not good for the knowledge economy, given labour market shortages.

Other solutions? Kences suggests, among other things, more flexible rules for shared housing in municipalities. The argument about nuisance should sometimes carry less weight than the housing crisis. Temporary contracts for students should also be possible again.

The shortage of student rooms is currently 21,500. That is the difference between the supply of student housing and the demand for it. That figure does not include students who have given up hope and are no longer looking. MBO students are also not counted.

If things continue as they are, the room shortage could rise to around 26,000 to 63,000 in the 2032/2033 academic year. Although the number of Dutch students is expected to fall and the number of foreign students is barely increasing, the private supply is shrinking even faster.

The National Student Housing Monitor is carried out by ABF-research, commissioned by Kences and the Ministry of Housing.