Universities of Amsterdam to students: Don’t come if you don’t have a room

This is due to a housing shortage. Such a call has never been made before, writes Het Parool.

There are now 72,769 students registered at the Amsterdam universities. 17,987 of them come from abroad. That number will probably continue to rise, because registration is still possible.

Over the past two years, some foreign students have sought refuge in hostels and holiday parks. That was possible, because there was space there because of corona.

Now that all holiday accommodations are old-fashioned filled again, that is no longer an option.

And so the message from the VU is: if you haven’t found a room before August 1, don’t come. The UvA will draw the line a little later and advises foreign students not to come if they have not found a place to live before 15 August.

‘Pain in the heart’

Utrecht University already announced earlier this year that it will advise students without accommodation ‘with a heavy heart’ to ‘think carefully’ about their coming to the city.

The number of international students at Dutch colleges and universities has increased by 12 percent in the past academic year, the Dutch organization for internationalization in education Nuffic reported earlier.

In the academic year 2021-2022, a total of around 115,000 students from other countries were enrolled in higher education.

No network

The supply of new student rooms is lagging behind the demand. An additional difficulty for foreign students is that they do not have a network to fall back on.

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