The government is neither pushing colleges to provide enough dormitory rooms nor ensuring the safety of off-campus student housing units for 670,000 students, civic groups said yesterday.
The safety of student housing caught the attention of the public in March when a fire at a privately run off-campus student housing complex near Donghua University in Hualien County in the middle of the night took one life.
At the time, the Ministry of Education promised to ensure the safety of student housing, but six months later the new semester has begun for college students and the problems remain, the Taiwan Alliance for Advancement of Youth Rights and Welfare and the Social Housing Promotion Alliance said.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
“There are 670,000 college students across the country with housing needs, but school dormitories are only capable of housing about 46 percent of them — approximately 330,000 — while the other 54 percent are on their own when it comes to finding accommodation near the school,” Taiwan Alliance for Advancement of Youth Rights and Welfare secretary-general Yeh Ta-hua (葉大華) told a press conference.
She said that despite the large number of students who need to find off-campus housing, there is still not a mechanism to make sure that off-campus housing is safe or for students to register complaints.
“There’s no way the for the government to continuously monitor these off-campus housing units and there is no channel through which students can file complaints if there is a problems with their accommodation,” Yeh said.
Social Housing Promotion Alliance spokesperson Lu Ping-yi (呂秉怡) said the ministry was ignoring the issue.
“With such a high demand for student housing, it should be a school’s responsibility to provide enough housing for their students and it’s the ministry’s responsibility to put pressure on schools to provide more housing units for their students,” Lu said. “However, whenever we talked to the ministry, officials told us that they shared our concern, but added that the handling of student accommodation is part of the academic independence of colleges.”
“If the ministry doesn’t do anything, the colleges won’t act,” he added.
Lu said the ministry promised to inspect safety at off-campus student housing units back in March, “and they said they completed the inspection by the end of June, but when we went to those off-campus student housing complexes that passed the inspection, we still found problems.”
For instance, Lu said, while showing pictures to the media, the emergency ladders were blocked by tin sheets at one apartment building rented out to students, while at another the gas-operated water heater is located in a closed hallway right outside the bathroom.
“The government is not working hard enough to urge colleges to provide more on-campus housing for students and it is also not doing what it promised — to ensure that student housing units are safe,” Lu said.
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