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Sydney, January 11 (Dialogue) Australia welcomes more international students back this year. Some predict that new enrollments in 2023 could even be higher than the 2019 pre-COVID record. Student visa applications in the second half of 2022 are up 40% compared to the same period in 2019.
On the downside, many of these students may struggle to find affordable and adequate accommodation. They are facing record low private rental vacancy rates and higher rents than before the pandemic.
Read also | Fragile economic conditions could trigger a recession, the World Bank said.
The International Student Legal Service NSW at Redfern Law Center has been helping international students for over ten years. Its senior lawyer, Sean Stimson, told us: The lease situation facing international students in the second half of 2022 – including illegal evictions and illegal rent increases – is the worst I have ever seen. Increasingly, we are seeing international students occupying sub-standard illegal accommodation, exposing themselves to dangerous conditions.
To make matters worse, some universities have been selling some student housing in response to a drop in revenue during the pandemic. In 2021, for example, UTS sold three 428-bed buildings to Scape, Australia’s largest provider of purpose-built student housing for $20 billion, for $95 million.
In some cases, this makes student accommodation more expensive. Rents are often comparable to or even higher than those in the wider private rental market.
As with any group, students’ financial resources vary widely. Yet little is known about these inequalities and their impact on international student housing and everyday life.
Our recently published study involving more than 7,000 international students showed that many were struggling financially even before the post-COVID rental crisis. They were very anxious about finding money to pay their rent and worried about becoming homeless.
We also found that food insecurity was prevalent among these students. More than one in five did not eat. Similar numbers fail to adequately heat or cool their homes.
What is the content of the research?
To examine students’ experiences of financial hardship or instability, we used the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ seven financial stress indicators. We have added a new item, “Can’t Afford Prescribed Textbooks”.
Our research project surveyed students in private rented accommodation in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s top destinations for international students, in late 2019.
Samples are drawn from all three higher education sectors. These include 10 universities, 24 vocational colleges, 7 English language colleges and 2 foundation course institutions.
We divided the 7,084 valid responses to the survey into four groups: safe (no indicators of financial stress), moderately unstable (one to two indicators), highly unstable (three to five) and extremely unstable (six to eight indivual).
About 44% of students were safe, 31% were moderately unstable, 20% were highly unstable, and 5% were extremely unstable.
How many students are in financial difficulty?
As the chart below shows, a large percentage of students are struggling. About 21 percent reported not eating in the past 12 months. 22% are unable to adequately heat or cool their home.
How affordable is student housing?
More than half of students classified as highly unstable and extremely unstable (53% and 58%, respectively) said they could not “easily afford housing.” This compares to 34% of moderately unstable students and 17% of secure students.
Paying rent is a source of anxiety for all groups. About 64% of highly unstable students and 81% of extremely unstable students said they often worry about paying their weekly rent, compared with 38% of moderately unstable students and 16% of stable students who said they often worry about Pay the rent.
Worryingly, 70% of extremely precarious students reported that they did not have essentials like food to pay their rent. This drops to 40 percent for highly unstable students, 16 percent for moderately unstable students, and 11 percent for secure students.
Many international students are employed, and paid work is closely associated with instability. A large proportion of extremely precarious and highly precarious students (87 percent and 70 percent, respectively) agree that paid work is essential to paying rent. In contrast, half of moderately unstable students and a quarter of stable students said they needed paid work to pay their rent.
Severe financial need may drive students to accept underpaid or insecure employment.
How safe do students feel about housing?
High rents are only part of the housing insecurity problem. When asked if they were concerned about being asked to leave residence at short notice, more than half of extremely unstable students said yes, as did 31% of highly unstable students. Only 18 percent of moderately unstable students and 11 percent of secure students had similar concerns.
A particularly worrying finding was that seven in 10 extremely unstable students and more than a third felt they might become homeless in the past year. Only 13% of moderately unstable students and 6% of secure students had this concern.
looking to the future
The rental housing crisis means that international students in need of housing may be worse off now than they were at the end of 2019.
Students from poorer backgrounds or countries are at particularly high risk. Policymakers and education providers must pay more attention to the accommodation of students coming to study in Australia. (dialogue)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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