To promote the socialization of logistics services, universities also need to ensure their public welfare.
A college student queues up downstairs in the dormitory to check in. Photo: Xinhua News Agency.
Text |Xiong Bingqi.
With the expansion of master's students, the shortage of accommodation resources in some colleges and universities has become more and more prominent. On December 10, a report on China News Network that "many colleges and universities clearly do not arrange accommodation, whether it is reasonable" once again sparked relevant discussions.
According to reports, in recent years, a number of universities have made it clear in their enrollment guidelines for master's degree students that they do not provide accommodation for full-time professional degree master's students. For example, Peking University's 2024 Master's Degree Enrollment Guide (Headquarters) clearly states that professional degree graduate schools do not arrange accommodation. Nanjing University has made it clear that in principle, the university will not provide on-campus accommodation for 2024 professional degree master's students, and students need to arrange their own accommodation, and the university will provide appropriate transportation subsidies to full-time professional degree master's students.
In fact, the university no longer provides accommodation services for some master's students, which attracted social attention as early as 2019. At that time, Fudan University and other universities made it clear that they would not provide on-campus accommodation for post-secondary and master's students, and would work with relevant faculties to expand off-campus accommodation resources and assist full-time students to solve their accommodation needs in a socialized way.
From the perspective of modern university construction, it is the general trend that universities do not provide accommodation services and promote the socialization of logistics services. However, at the same time, it is also necessary for the society to have corresponding supporting services to ensure the public welfare of socialized logistics services.
Since the 90s of the last century, China has been promoting the socialization and reform of university logistics services, and the main measures include providing student apartment services for students by off-campus enterprises and institutions, and students live in off-campus apartments, or rent off-campus apartments by themselves, so that schools can focus on education and teaching. However, this reform has since been met with resistance, which has been questioned about affecting boarding education for students and increasing their financial burden.
Therefore, in the past 20 years, China's colleges and universities have mainly adopted the accommodation service mode of collective dormitories provided by the school for students, and only a few colleges and universities have introduced social forces to provide students with the service mode of choosing off-campus student apartments.
However, nowadays, the service mode of collective dormitories provided by schools has become less and less suitable for the requirements of higher education reform and development. For example, the university promotes the teaching management of the credit system, implements a flexible study system, and takes 5 or 6 years to complete the undergraduate studies, how to solve the dormitory?
As China's colleges and universities strengthen the quality control of graduate training, more graduate students postpone their graduation, and solving their accommodation problems is also a major problem.
In addition, in recent years, many colleges and universities in China are expanding the scale of graduate student enrollment, if it is necessary to solve the problem of student accommodation for graduation according to the prescribed academic system, the expansion of enrollment will be blocked, so that professional masters can rent off-campus housing, which is also a realistic choice for colleges and universities to cope with the expansion of graduate students.
Due to the fact that the cost of renting a house off-campus is higher than that of the dormitory provided by the school, many professional masters question the school's practice of increasing their burden and discriminating against professional masters: why can academic masters live in on-campus dormitories?
Therefore, to solve this problem, we should not simply ask professional masters to rent a house by themselves, but should start from the actual situation of students and provide them with corresponding convenience for renting off-campus.
To this end, the school should cooperate with the locality, streets, and communities to provide students with off-campus accommodation resources, and the local government should include students' off-campus rental housing into the talent low-rent housing policy to give appropriate preferential treatment and subsidies.
The school should also integrate on-campus and off-campus accommodation resources, and apply for all students equally, so that students can choose to live in on-campus dormitories or off-campus dormitories according to their actual situation. On the basis of the implementation of the free application system, poor students should also be given priority to apply for on-campus housing.
In fact, only a handful of universities in developed countries offer partial on-campus housing for undergraduate and graduate students, and many of the university's senior undergraduate and graduate students rent off-campus housing, which allows universities to better focus on education and academic research.
Therefore, there is no need to make a fuss about the fact that universities do not provide accommodation services, but should focus on how to implement socialized accommodation methods, which can not only be conducive to the operation of the school, but also give students the right to choose independently, and fulfill the basic responsibility of guaranteeing students.
Written by Bingqi Xiong (Education Scholar).
Edited by Xu Qiuying.
Proofread by Zhao Lin.