2023-08-14 10:12:01
Noa Moussa with AFP / Photo credit: Amaury Cornu / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP
modified to
7:08 p.m., August 14, 2023
Explosion of food expenditure and insufficient grants: the cost of living is rising sharply for students due in particular to inflation, according to a survey by the student union Unef, published Monday. For the year 2023-2024, the cost of student living increases by 6.47%, according to Unef. This represents a necessary additional budget of 594.76 euros for the year, or 49.56 euros more per month.
“We had never reached such heights”
“Never, in 19 years of investigation by Unef, has the evolution of the cost of student living reached such heights”, underlines the union, which produces this projection, from an assessment of the situation. financial support for several typical student profiles. “We are reaching a stage of major student precariousness which sets in over time and whose evolution from one year to the next is constantly more important”.
“We have students who will skip meals or who will give up treatment”
“This year, we have a significant increase in the cost of student living and this has had a very concrete impact. We have students who will skip meals or who will give up treatment, who will give up buying textbooks to go study. This has direct consequences on the lives of hundreds of thousands of students who will still have to potentially endanger their studies, even their mental and physical health, “says Félix Sosso, spokesperson for Fage.
“What we are waiting for is a structural reform of the scholarship system. There was a somewhat symbolic measure that was announced this year with 500 million that was put on the scholarship system but in fact, that simply serves to make up for years of an archaic system. And it has barely made it possible to revalue at the height of inflation for the first levels of scholarships, which means that we have a revaluation of scholarships that will be lower than the inflation for certain thresholds”, he adds at the microphone of Europe 1.
The student budget is weighed down in particular by increases in transport costs (+5.91% for non-scholarship holders, +3.95% for scholarship holders), food (+14.3%) and electricity (+10.1%).
Government’s lack of action blamed
Unef also questions the government’s lack of action to remedy the situation. The union, close to the left, considers in particular the recent reform of scholarships as “largely insufficient” to fight once morest student precariousness.
The government has planned to increase the amount of student scholarships to more than 500 million euros, allowing in particular 35,000 new students to become scholarship holders from the start of the school year. The amount of scholarships, now varying from 145.40 to 633.50 euros per month, remains however “largely insufficient” to live, points out the Unef.
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