AUSTIN, Texas — Editor's note: the video attached does not relate to the story.
A new report has found that almost half of University of Texas at Austin's first-year class doesn't live in on-campus housing due to lack of availability and rising costs of living.
According to an article from KVUE's news partners at the Austin American-Statesman, 40% of the freshman class at UT had to live off campus in the Fall 2021 semester.
The report, which came from the Common Data Set, found that students lived off campus because of lack of availability and rising cost of living in Austin. The university has not expanded its on-campus housing footprint since 2007, forcing new students to find housing elsewhere.
The cost to live off campus for students averages between $13,058 and $13,280, according to the report, whereas living on campus costs $12,729 for a nine-month living contract, including an unlimited meal plan.
The demand year-over-year for on-campus housing at UT has continued to grow, as has enrollment. But the number of available rooms and beds has remained stagnant.
The article states that students that remain on campus maintain higher grades, graduation rates and more involvement in extracurricular activities.
For August 2022, UT received a total of 17,751 applications to live on-campus. Of those applications, only 9,907 were accepted, forcing over 7,000 students to find off campus living arrangements before the semester began.
Although UT has plans to expand a multistory building in East Austin to house over 700 graduate students by Fall 2024, there has not been any information on expanding undergraduate living.
The issue runs further back than initially proposed, as the Centennial Commission – a group in charge of creating goals for UT's future – stated that UT needed to build more on-campus housing in 1983. This same recommendation has been persistent as the decades increase, the report states.
To learn more about UT's housing predicament, read the Statesman's full report.