The oddities of accommodation at Cambridge

For this very reason, various “taster” schemes exist which allow secondary school pupils to spend a few days at Cambridge, in order to see it for themselves. One such programme exists specifically for Czech and Slovak students: http://www.experience-cambridge.org/cs/.

Finding and financing accommodation is probably the most important non-academic problem that someone wanting to study abroad faces. Looking for accommodation on the open rental market is difficult. However, Cambridge student accommodation is no free market; it is governed by its own rules which bring advantages and disadvantages, discussed in this article.
From an accommodation perspective, Cambridge is much better than most other universities in Great Britain. Almost all colleges guarantee almost all undergraduate students accommodation for the full duration of their course (the only exceptions are e.g. students with children), while in London it is common that university accommodation is guaranteed only to those who chose the university as their firm choice in UCAS, and even then only for their first year. Thereafter, London students must look for accommodation on the open market, which, in London, is neither easy nor cheap.  Few London students would disagree with that.
Cambridge also has the advantage (for accommodation, though perhaps not for study) that its terms are short, and that it is not always necessary (but it is possible) to rent accommodation during vacations: students at my college, Trinity, pay only 30 weeks’ rent instead of 52. However, this differs between colleges: at St John’s, students must rent for 38.5 weeks per year, and at Girton they must rent for 37 weeks. During the vacations, college accommodation is used for various summer schools and conferences.

However, college accommodation is mandatory at Cambridge: if I wanted to live outside my college, I would have to ask for permission, and even with such permission I would not be able to live anywhere I wanted. According to an ancient rule, no undergraduate student living outside their college may live farther than three miles from Great St Mary’s Church, even though some colleges are located outside this radius.
The fact that students have no realistic choice but to live in college accommodation may be a disadvantage. For example, it happened to me that our shared kitchen has no stove; in fact, stoves are strictly prohibited in college accommodation. I presume that our college wants us to spend our time studying rather than cooking, and that is also why it collects a compulsory termly charge for access to the canteen. This is a minor nuisance compared to the problems of certain other Oxbridge colleges; you can read about various accommodation scandals surrounding Murray Edwards College, Cambridge or St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford in the respective student newspapers. Fortunately, these horror stories are exceptions.

I wrote above that Cambridge accommodation is not governed by free market principles. That is because key roles in the availability of good rooms are played not only by their price but also by chance and by exam results. For our first year, our rooms were allocated randomly; we could only choose a price band. (I chose the lowest price band and paid dearly for it: I got a room with a shared bath, but without a shower.) For our second year, there was a ballot: one randomly selected student chose their room, then the second chose one of those that remained, and so forth until the 203rd student had chosen. The order for the third year is decided as follows: the first pick is given to those students who receive first class honours in their first year, and the others choose afterwards. Within these two groups, the order from the second year is reversed, so that the student who is 203rd in the second year ballot is first in the third year ballot if they receive first class honours in their first year. This system is somewhat controversial and some colleges have abolished it because the academic pressure on students is already great without it. Newnham College has even introduced equal rents for all rooms, with great controversy.

There is one more complication: the price of accommodation varies between colleges. This is determined not only by the quality of accommodation (the size of rooms, the availability of a kitchen, whether bathrooms are shared and so forth), but by the college it belongs to. This is because the colleges are legally and financially independent from the university, and are free to set their own rents. The richest college, Trinity, has twenty-three times more assets per student than the poorest, Hughes Hall. The unpleasant fact that the average Trinity student pays £121 per week while the average, say, Robinson student pays £172 is one of the many internal political problems of the university. Even thornier politically is the fact that all women’s colleges have very high average rent (Murray Edwards: £171, Newnham: £169, Lucy Cavendish: £163). It is therefore prudent to inform oneself of the rent and the quality of accommodation when choosing a college.

That is the situation from a student’s perspective, but the university and the city are two different worlds, and from the city’s perspective the situation is immeasurably worse. The success of the university and the technology companies associated with it has caused a rise in real estate prices since 2008 which is the second greatest in the country (with London, of course, in first place). Local and national media speak of a housing crisis. In these circumstances, I am glad for college accommodation, despite all its flaws.

The statistics on average rents in this article come from a survey run by Cambridge University Students’ Union this academic year, https://www.cusu.co.uk/2018/11/07/rent-new-data-reveal-extent-of-disparity-and-student-discontent/; a study by the student newspaper Varsity last year with a different methodology gave similar but different results,  https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/14904.