Some Ibn Zohr University students are skipping classes and travelling to Agadir only for exams as rents of up to MAD 2,000 for a single room put another university year beyond the means of families already struggling with living costs.
Others have dropped out and gone looking for work, according to students who spoke to Le360. Farms in Chtouka, shops in Agadir, restaurants and cafés have taken in young people who had come to the city to study.
Mohamed Aouad, an Ibn Zohr student, said a room in a three-bedroom apartment now costs between MAD 1,500 and MAD 2,000 a month.
Students coming from across Souss-Massa and other regions first try their luck farther from the university, where rents are cheaper. What they save on the room, they spend partly on getting to and from campus.
Some eventually stop making the daily trip.
Aouad said there were students who returned home and came back to Agadir for examinations. Others left university, found jobs and began helping parents who could no longer afford to keep them in the city.
Abdelaziz Ouaâthmane came to Aït Melloul from Taliouine, in Taroudant province, after obtaining his baccalaureate. The new Ibn Zohr student is still looking for a room.
He said accommodation had proved the hardest part of settling into university, with food and other daily expenses already eating into what families can afford.
The search is playing out in Salam, Jit Sakan, Dakhla, Tamdid and Al Qods, where association activist Aziza Othmani said rents had become “unreasonable.”
Othmani lives far from the campus. Rather than rent accommodation for her children near the university, she drives them there every day.
Monthly tenants are also competing with the short-stay business.
Aouad said some apartments were being rented by the night for more than MAD 500, reducing the number of homes available to students looking for somewhere to stay through the academic year. He also blamed speculation and brokers operating without sufficient oversight.
Real estate intermediary Samir Akarzabi said some investors were keeping their properties off the rental market altogether, leaving fewer homes available as students and their parents went looking.
He said he had watched families accompany their children around Agadir in search of accommodation and fail to find it.
Aouad also pointed to the shortage of university residences and the concentration of faculties in major cities. Students from smaller towns and rural areas have to leave home for programs they cannot find locally, he said, only to run into housing costs once they arrive.
He called on the next government to tackle a problem that, he said, returns every university year.
For Ouaâthmane, the new university year has already started. His search for somewhere to live has not ended.
