The higher education minister in Poland’s new government has announced plans to provide 150 million zloty (€34.5 million) for universities to develop and renovate student dorms.
“The ministry wants to support the renovation of dormitories, because we know that due to their [poor] condition, 30% of places in these dormitories are unused,” Dariusz Wieczorek told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper on Wednesday.
“There is real potential here – instead of living in a rented apartment and paying 3,000 zloty (€691) a month, a student should have a dormitory available,” he added.
Minister nauki: 150 mln zł dla uczelni na remont akademików, powstaje też projekt ustawy dot. tej sprawy#PAPinformacje https://t.co/2VdV52Cami
— PAP (@PAPinformacje) December 28, 2023
The following day, his ministry unveiled plans to provide such funding. The money will be divided between all 87 universities in Poland with student halls of residence that already receive state subsidies. It will be a one-off payment that does not affect any other subsidies.
Each university will receive a share of the funding proportional to the number of places they have in dorms, up to a maximum of 4 million zloty for a single university.
Wieczorek said on Thursday that his ministry had already prepared draft legislation enabling the payments and was currently discussing its final form with the development ministry. He expressed hope that it would be finished in January.
The number of foreign students in Poland has exceeded 100,000 for the first time.
The figure, now 105,400, has tripled in the last decade and almost 9% of all students in Poland are now from abroad https://t.co/XPYL0ExCh7
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 20, 2023
The minister was also asked by Rzeczpospolita about the likelihood of implementing one of the pre-election pledges of Poland 2050 (Polska 2050), a party in the new ruling coalition. It promised to introduce a “Dorm room for 1 zloty” programme for students moving to study in big cities from smaller towns.
Wieczorek, who is from the New Left (Nowa Lewica), another of the new ruling parties, noted that such a programme “would require changing the entire financing system”.
“First, we need to create a situation where these dorm [places]exist. And then we think about how they should be financed and how much the student should pay for them,” he added.
Poland has around 1.2 million students but enough dorm places for less than 10% of them, lower than the European average of 13%, found a report by real estate service agency CBRE earlier this year. The number of places in dorms declined from 144,000 in 2008 to 112,000 currently.
Nationalists have criticised one of Poland's leading universities for admitting many foreign students, claiming that it favours them over Polish high school graduates
One far-right group hung a sign outside saying that the university should be “for Poles” https://t.co/CPWR1T37Yr
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 22, 2021
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Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
