Downturn makes housing come easy for students, but jobs, tuition still concern
Posted Aug 24, 2016 1:25 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Crystal Laderas and Dave Will
A back to school challenge that has been a common one in Calgary is a challenge no more: the traditional mad-scramble for student housing
For post-secondary students in Calgary of the not-too-distance past, finding a decent place to live during the school year was almost like winning the lottery.
“We’re seeing that there’s a tonne of availability this year,” University of Calgary Student VP Tristan Bray said. “Two of my friends recently, their lease ends at the end of August, and they started looking for place last week and found one within the week.”
A student representative at SAIT said their group is getting more calls from desperate landlords than students this year.
However, the big issues for students are finding jobs and worries about tuition, heading into the final year of the province’s two-year freeze.
“We just don’t know what’s going to happen to tuition,” Bray said. “It could go up after the freeze, it could stay the same, it could be frozen longer, it could get tied to CPI, we just have no idea what’s going to happen to tuition.”
“That’s really, really concerning to students.”
