N°76 — Studies, mould and mezzanines

— WARSAW, 10 JUNE 2026

“They call it ‘Magical Kraków’,” tourists are told about the city where I went to university. Having grown up in a post-communist town, living in a charming nineteenth-century tenement house seemed like the height of sophistication. Especially for a philosophy student. The rule was simple: the more mould on the walls, the greater the chance of achieving metaphysical insight.

After weeks of hunting for listings, two friends and I ended up in Służbówka, a dark little flat carved out of what had once been servants’ quarters. And it wasn’t cheap. In winter, it was so cold that our toothpaste froze. The water in the shower gave us electric shocks. One day, a sewage pipe burst inside the wall. The owner of the building, a well-known Kraków lawyer, deducted the cost of the damage from our deposit.

Anyone who started university in Poland in 2009 will have a similar story. Living in a walk-through room or on a “mezzanine” – which usually meant a wooden platform squeezed under the ceiling. Surviving on pasta with ketchup. And landlords feeding off our naivety.

Today’s students don’t have it much better. Some of those dumps have been renovated. They now come with cheap laminate flooring, an IKEA lamp and the label “apartment”.

The carpets from the communist era are gone, but the prices have doubled.

Relatively equal access to education – one of the advantages of Eastern Europe’s version of communism – has finally become a thing of the past. But the biggest change is not the housing itself. It is how students think about it.

We assumed this was simply the student experience. We never asked: why doesn’t a public university provide the conditions necessary for studying? But generation Z are.

Last May, students at the University of Warsaw occupied a campus building. They demanded public cafeterias, more dormitory places and recognition that living conditions are part of education, not a private problem for unlucky kids from small towns.

At the time, Krytyka Polityczna (the media outlet Kaja works for, ed) interviewed the protest organisers. One of them, Staszek, said that only around 7.5 percent of University of Warsaw students could count on getting a place in a dormitory. Everyone else was pushed onto the private rental market. Last week, I called him to ask whether the strike had changed anything.

“There are still not enough dormitory places. There is still only one public canteen in Warsaw” he admitted reluctantly. He told me about hours spent scrolling through OLX (an online market place, ed) and Facebook groups, about rooms in Warsaw costing 2,000 złoty a month – more than half of Poland’s minimum wage -and about the fact that most students now have to combine studying with full-time work.

“Some people are lucky enough to be able to study while they work,” Staszek told me. “A friend of mine works at a reception desk where there’s very little traffic, so she can sit with her books or catch up on missed lectures. But in many cases, the workload forces students to interrupt their studies or drop out altogether.”

Still, Staszek does not consider last year’s strike a failure. “The strike made people much more aware of the problem. University authorities and politicians can still try to dodge responsibility, but now they actually have something to dodge. People are asking questions. The media are asking. Voters are asking. Last month, Polish researchers took to the streets demanding that spending on science be increased to 3 percent of GDP. They included our demands in their campaign.”

Demands. That is the key word.

We, millennials, turned our housing nightmares into funny stories. Generation Z turns them into political demands.

And they shout when those demands are ignored. In May this year, instead of the affordable cafeteria students had been calling for, the University of Warsaw Library opened BUWBAR, a “loft-style food court” serving “premium street food”. Student protests eventually forced the venue to close – at least temporarily. University authorities later informed student representatives that they were negotiating with the owner about adapting the menu to students’ budgets.

My nineteen-year-old self would probably have shrugged and accepted it. She would have assumed that the world belonged to lawyers who owned tenement houses and people who could afford a matcha latte in the library. Today’s students are fighting to change that world. And even when they do not win, they refuse to pretend that this is normal.

— KAJA