“They ask you to get a good note to enter the race. You do it, but you can’t afford to live in the city where the university is.” Reflection He is from Carlos, a 21 -year -old university student who studies law and fights with the complicated task of looking for a rental that does not swallow his entire budget of the month, something that is not easy in a residential market of Shot pricesconditions Draconians and marked by The “boom” of tourist rentals.
His is an isolated case. On the contrary, it reflects an increasingly worrying reality: the price of housing is costing Spain for more than families savings capacityhe is also spending his talent.
“It affects the right to study”. That the price of housing influences the place where one can study their career is nothing new. It happened years ago. And decades. Even before the brick bubble. However, as rentals climb up to approach to the bubble peaks of 2007 and Spain entered a “Social Emergency” Marked by the house, the problem has become more and more serious. Have a roof today comes out and force tenants to assume conditions Hardwhich directly conditions students.
It I recognized In 2024 the Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Diana Morantwhose department even signed A protocol with the Ministries of Economy and Housing precisely to promote “affordable” rental among university students. “The housing crisis is affecting the right to study a university career, Morant insisted. “Access to the university should only be limited by merit and personal effort, not for economic reasons.”
“It’s a palmaria reality”. Morant is not the only one aware of the problem. The difficulties that young people find themselves when looking for accommodation worries to unions and even rectors, which They are not alien how the scale €/m2 of cities influences both or more in the future of students than selectivity.
“The lack of accommodation is a Palmaria reality. We have 2,000 requests from place in residences for 1,000 squares,” I confessed recently to The country Ángel Arias, rector of the Carlos III University, who laments how difficult it is to solve the problem for the campus themselves. “Building a building is 25 million euros if you have the ground. It is 10% of the entire university budget.”
Beyond Madrid and Barcelona. The problem is not exclusive to the great metropolis. “The issue of rates is not a great inconvenience to study at the university. What begins to be the limiting element? In some cities it is already the price of rental houses,” ditch Julián Garde, from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Similarly, his Extremadura counterpart, Pedro Fernández, is expressed, convinced that the cost of registration no longer removes the dream of the students of the students. They do the rentals, the €/m2. “In Mérida and Cáceres there is a lot of accommodation availability that is used for tourism, and that makes the prices for the students have a lot.”
How serious is the problem? Recently Live4lifea student specialized rental platform, launched A study which reveals that when deciding in which university 45% of young people are going to be formed are conditioned by a key factor: the rental price. Moreover, 58% rules out the most expensive cities and 64% indicate the cost of housing as its main obstacle, which conditions both their academic future and their way of looking for floors.
“Young people delay as much as possible the search for a place to live during the university course. There are few offers and prices are rising, so they expect much more to see if they find any bargain,” assures The firm’s CEO, Alberto Añaños. The problem is aggravated if you take into account that more and more students They demand training outside their province of origin: in the 2022/2023 course they already exceeded 300,000 people, and many move to another autonomous community. Who do they do? Above all Students with parents with higher studies and good jobs, which suggests a social gap.
“You have to pass some ‘hunger games'”. So far the perspective of politicians, rectors and researchers, but … how do the students themselves live? Eldiario.es published A report with testimonies of several university students who demonstrate how the high cost of the house (and the hardening of the requirements requested by the homemade) is conditioning their training.
“There are people who are renouncing their university square for the impossibility of being able to pay a rental. If it is already difficult to access a place in the university, now the housing crisis adds one more lock,” Underline Coral Latorre, directive of the Student Union, before warning that this handicap does not affect everyone equally. It weighs mostly in the humblest homes.
Idealist slopes. “My sister is 18 years old and has made selectivity. He wants confesses María Ángeles Guzmán, of the Coordinator of Representatives of Public University Students.
Another young university student, Avril, 22, sees with impotence how the start date of his face -to -face master’s degree is approaching and does not yet have an apartment in which to stay. He had signed one and even paid to reserve it, but assures that the real estate company told her and her partner that the agreement could not be closed because they do not meet the conditions of “economic solvency study.”
Is the house so expensive? The figures are eloquent again. According to Idealista, throughout the last decade (August 2015 to the same month of 2025), rentals have almost doubled in Spain: € 7.5/m2 have passed to 14.5. And that is the state average. In Madrid it went from € 11.9/m2 to 22.2 and in Barcelona from 12.3 to 23.1. They are relevant data because, in addition to being the largest cities in the country, they are also the ones that brings together greater concentration of universities.
The newspaper It echoed last year of A report which highlights the power of attraction of both regions for university students: to differences from other regions of Spain, they retain 98% of their resident students and attract a very high percentage of young people from other points in Spain. Other regions that also maintain an important portion of their university students are Andalusia and the Valencian Community, which have not been alien to the price increase.
Images | Meredith Spencer (UNSPLASH) and Jordi Moncasi (UNSPLASH)
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