How Were AUBG Students Left Living in a Hotel?

At the start of the academic year, an unexpected problem emerged at  AUBG – a lot of new students but not enough rooms in the Skaptopara Residence Halls for all of them to live in.

A  week before the start of orientation week, some of the new students were informed that there was no place left for them in the dormitories, even though all of them had already paid for housing on campus. That is why they had to stay in Hotel Merida – a hotel arranged by AUBG that is approximately 20 minutes away from the three Skaptos.

An anonymous student had not even been informed of the unfortunate situation. "I was promised a place in Skaptopara 2 but unfortunately on the day of my arrival, I was informed by the director of housing in AUBG that in my room there is already somebody accommodated," they said. 

Students have not yet received a proper explanation of why this occurred and why AUBG neglected their housing promise. "I expected the hotel to be in good condition but that was not the case. In addition, the hotel told us that we had to pay 250 leva per month to use AC and refrigerator," the same anonymous student said.

The interviewed students are of the same opinion that this problem is unacceptable and that is the reason why most of them have moved away from Hotel Merida. At the moment, some of the students have returned to live in Skapto because a few rooms have become available. 

Still, not all of them had the same luck, so they had to find and rent apartments in Blagoevgrad in a very short time – something that they did not expect when they were accepted to study at AUBG.

In their opinion, AUBG should address the situation.

On the other hand, AUBG authorities see the issue from a different perspective. The Dean of Students, Sabina Wien, says that the problem is more complex.

"We typically accept more students than there are places in Skapto," she said. This is due to a variety of different factors but the main one is the summer melt. Summer melt is a phenomenon defined as the drop-off of college-intending students over the summer between high school graduation and college enrollment.

However, this year, the summer melt was unexpectedly low, which caused the number of students in the university to be higher than the number of beds in dormitories. That, combined with other factors that cannot be controlled by AUBG, such as the pandemic, some late payments by students, and the low number of juniors and seniors who want to live off-campus, are the main reasons behind the unfortunate case.

"We know that we could have done something better but we still do not know what," Wien said.

As for the hotel, the Residence Life Director Ilko Drenkov, says that they had no other solution, and Hotel Merida was the only suitable option with enough places for all the students left without AUBG housing.

"My idea is to encourage juniors to find places and to restrict seniors from living in the Residence Halls" he suggested. Dean Wien promised that AUBG would do everything possible if the same issue occurs again because AUBG wants as many students as possible studying to live on campus.

Since the housing problem has not been solved yet, the next semester Erasmus students will be forced to live off-campus. The advice she gave to future AUBG students was to submit their documents and make payments on time to assure a place in Skapto in case a similar situation repeats in the future.

The AUBG strategic plan 2022-2027 was approved in May and includes an increase of the student body by 50% in the next 5 years. However, the university still does not have an exact strategy for where these students are going to stay.