The NSW university that wants to halve students’ rent

The head of the University of NSW has vowed to double its student housing and offer it at half the cost of some private providers in a bid to make the institution accessible to poorer students.

UNSW vice chancellor Attila Brungs has unveiled a 10-year strategy titled “Progress for All”, containing principles to guide the university’s teaching and research focus and a new campus infrastructure masterplan, which includes doubling the number of university colleges.

Today’s students have to work part-time or full-time jobs, says University of NSW vice chancellor Attila Brungs.Credit: Janie Barrett

“Some might say, universities, given we’re under attack from different places, it’s better if we just bunker down. But this is about all of us standing up at this moment in time and really driving something,” Brungs said.

Australian universities have been criticised for using international students as cash cows and overpaying vice chancellors, some of whom earn more than $1 million a year. A Senate inquiry is also probing governance issues in the sector after a string of wage theft scandals.

The UNSW plan says students should “learn in ways that suit them”. Research will focus on areas that have the greatest positive societal impact.

“Most of my students now have to work, many part-time, many full-time jobs,” Brungs said. “You have to make sure that every time they come to campus, it’s a really valuable experience.”

With Sydney’s rental market keeping university students from living near campus, the new strategy includes building more spaces on campus for student accommodation as well as learning.

“The very first thing I’m building as a priority is more affordable student housing, so I’m about to double the amount of colleges we have on campus and have the right price points, which are half that of [private student housing provider] Scape,” he said.

Down the road, at Kensington, the amount being charged by Scape for a share room exceeds $600 a week, while students are being charged up to $900 for a small studio.

Before he arrived at UNSW, Brungs was vice chancellor of UTS. In 2021, during his time there, that university sold off student housing it owned to Scape, a decision he said was to avoid forced redundancies during the pandemic.

While UNSW will be “flexible by default” to give students options to access their education online, according to the plan, Brungs is adamant the physical campus is more important than ever.

Student accommodation near the university is in some cases costing students almost $1000 for a small studio.Credit: Quentin Jones

“If I go back 10 years, part of the point of face-to-face was basically to tell you the information that you should be reading in the frigging book,” he said.

Now, he says, central to on-campus activities are “key human problem-solving skills” to ensure students across fields such as health and engineering are not completely “AI-ed out” of their jobs.

“The face-to-face component is absolutely critical,” he said.

The university will also increase community access to campus spaces and facilities.

Brungs said UNSW had to reach out more to low socioeconomic students at school, provide scholarships, help them build networks early on and give them academic support to increase the success of poorer students once they are enrolled.

“I am a little bit disappointed, sometimes, with arguments about access to university … they talk about access, but not success,” he said.

“So then a whole lot of people are let in. And in some universities, you know, about a third of them, more, don’t make it through.

“We found that if you support someone in their first year, they will fly no matter what their educational disadvantage [was] before they got into university.”

UNSW has traditionally been popular with students wishing to study medicine and science. Compared with other top-tier universities, it educates a higher proportion of students who came from public schools (about 60 per cent of its student cohort).

Unlike other universities, UNSW has not engaged in trying to woo students with early offers before HSC students sit their exams. Instead, it has targeted its early offers scheme at students who live in low-socioeconomic areas, Indigenous students and select schools.

“ATAR is one of the least-worst options for what I call a meritocracy of getting in,” he said.

There are nine “pillars” to UNSW’s new strategy, including accelerating the transition to a sustainable planet, enabling healthy lives, creating “a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment that optimises … research” and “strengthening societal resilience, security and cohesion”.

In a bid to achieve the latter, the university will launch the UNSW Public Policy Institute.

“Through this work, we will establish a globally recognised public policy institute that redefines public policy education and practice, grounded in data and impact, and driven by the principle that public policy is a science, not an ideology,” the strategy says.

Brungs says universities can drive progress. But he is also realistic.

“We can’t do everything. So, where do we focus? Where we can really make a difference for society.”

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