Young People in China Face Job-Hunting Challenges, Leading to a Surge in Graduate Applicants and Resulting in Insufficient Dormitory Space
“Overloaded” Old Campuses
In August 2023, a first-year graduate student at Shanghai Normal University, Xiao Zhang, learned a week before the start of the semester that due to the shortage of dormitories in the Xuhui campus, more than 260 graduate freshmen had not been assigned beds. She immediately called the dormitory garden center for consultation, and the teacher told her that they would try their best to arrange the graduate freshmen in the Xuhui campus. Currently, students without classes are being mobilized to return to the Fengxian campus for accommodation.
First-year graduate student Xiao Yang of the 2023 class also faced the same problem. Last year, close to the start of the school year, the counselor informed her that the dormitory was tight and she might not be allocated a dormitory in the Xuhui campus, advising her to be mentally prepared. “All the graduate courses are in the Xuhui campus, and the Fengxian campus is more than 40 kilometers away from the Xuhui campus, making commuting to class unrealistic.” Xiao Yang is a local in Shanghai, but her home is in the suburbs, more than an hour and a half away from the Xuhui campus. After trying to commute for a week, she finally waited for a graduating senior sister to leave the dormitory, and Xiao Yang moved into the Xuhui campus dormitory.
A counselor at Shanghai Normal University told the Economic Observer that the Xuhui campus is an old campus with relatively few dormitories, and the shortage has been getting worse in recent years. The school’s solution is to try to encourage local students to commute, especially for students from far away, to register first. If new beds become available, they will be allocated based on the distance of students’ homes.
Similarly, Xiao Xi, an undergraduate student at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, said that for students with Shanghai household registration, the school only provides dormitories for students living outside the outer ring, while students living inside the outer ring need to commute to class every day. Even living inside the outer ring, it still takes him an hour to reach the school.
Lin Fan, a person in charge of a dormitory-style long-term rental apartment company, has felt the shortage of university dormitories for several years. In 2019, Fudan University and Tongji University almost simultaneously contacted Lin Fan’s company, hoping to rent apartments as dormitories for graduate and international students. In the following years, a total of 7 universities in Shanghai alone communicated their intentions to rent long-term apartments for dormitory use.
He vividly remembers the urgent situation of one of the schools, which not only rented the spare dormitories of a nearby vocational and technical college but also encouraged undergraduates to solve their accommodation through subsidies a few years ago. The university maximized space utilization by adding toilets to dormitory rooms, allowing the two washing areas on each floor to be converted into dormitory rooms.
In recent years, the shortage of student dormitories has been a common phenomenon in universities in Shanghai.
A person from a long-term rental apartment company told the Economic Observer that in 2022, they accommodated more than 250 master’s students from a certain university in Shanghai in a dormitory-style apartment in Pudong. From viewing to signing, it took less than a week, as the university had been renting a dormitory building from another university for student accommodation due to a long-term shortage. In 2022, the other university also ran out of dormitory space and took back the building for its own use. The university had to temporarily find off-campus dormitories. Two years later, the number of rooms rented by the university increased by 20% compared to 2022.