Accommodation offers for campus are due to be released this week, the week of June 13th, a solid month later than 2015 offers. Though finding accommodation is a significant stress in student lives, there has been no communication, apology or update on the status of the 2016/17 applications. Word-of-mouth rumblings over the whereabouts of offers have led to suspicions about increases in rent, but for all intents and purposes students have been left in the dark.
In response to a query from The University Times, Caoimhe Ni Lochlainn, College Press Officer, stated that the delay in issuing offers was due to “the revision of residential charges and the consequent requirement to undertake some additional configuration of [the] software”. And yet there has been no indication what this revision will entail. Will charges increase and will this increase be significant enough to drastically strain tight budgets? Accommodation on campus is already prohibitively expensive for many, though the costliness of central Dublin rent may justify prices to a certain extent. But many students have budgeted for a certain threshold and anticipate that costs will stay the same. Explanations for the cost of campus living don’t vindicate not warning students that changes are due.
It might be necessary to revise costs, but it’s not necessary to reveal this only after students have submitted applications and waited for months to hear if they have a place.
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If residential charges do drastically increase, then making these changes midway through June will only exacerbate stress. It might be necessary to revise costs, but it’s not necessary to reveal this only after students have submitted applications and waited for months to hear if they have a place. We’re fully into the summer now and many students may be abroad or working full-time. To find that you can’t afford the new rent thresholds or, worse, that you were unsuccessful in your application means that you’ll be forced to start searching for a place to live and people to live with in a cutthroat accommodation market that is not sympathetic to student tenants. Many will have already started searching for next year’s house, leaving students at an even greater disadvantage than if they’d known they were unsuccessful in May.
Offers are substantially later this year than in others – a problem in itself. But the entire setup of the accommodation process in Trinity needs to be reworked. All applications for rooms on campus are assessed and authorised by the Registrar of Chambers, who is an officer of the College. With hundreds of applications to review, where each application features a personal statement pleading for campus accommodation, it’s no wonder that it usually takes from February until May to provide information about who’ll be living where. Having one individual overseeing the process is not problematic in itself – although it is a bit slow – but having someone who also has academic responsibilities at this time of year only serves to slow the process down further.
The opacity of the accommodation allocation is not helped by this. For the UCD campus, where 2,810 rooms are available, the allocation of room spaces is very clear, with a certain number of spaces assigned to different categories that include “Non-EU International Graduates”, “Final Year Students”, and “UCD Access Centre”, among others. Their booking system is entirely online and students can search through the available rooms and select the one they want.
How many societies are you involved in, what’s your sob-story, and does any of it even need to be true?
In stark contrast, Trinity students submit a vague application where we justify why we deserve accommodation, with no indication of what kind of justification we need to provide. Are you the Chair of DUBES or the Secretary of Amnesty? How many societies are you involved in, what’s your sob-story, and does any of it even need to be true? Try searching for the name of any society’s incoming OCM and tell me the Registrar of Chambers is capable of confirming the weird and wonderful accommodation application claims. Not that it makes a difference whether you have a position on a committee or not: applications are due prior to most society AGMs, and so a claim that you intend to run for President of the Phil may not even technically be untrue.
Trinity’s accommodation process is an impenetrable game of justification and waiting, which has not improved in the face of all the ruckus over accommodation difficulties for Dublin students. We have no idea how many places there are for certain students, what kind of background information is needed to guarantee you a space, and even what date we can expect offers on – the 11th of May, the 13th of June, or some other nebulous time? In discussing who’s going to get campus, we say “you’re from Kerry” or “you’re involved in that society”, but most of us know people who ticked all the mysterious boxes and yet still were rejected, and others who live in Ballsbridge and weren’t involved in College life at all who managed to get Front Square. If students must be left waiting for months on end then there should be some transparency in the process, even so that we can prepare a failsafe and not find ourselves scrabbling for somewhere to live in the middle of June.
