BELGRADE: Hit with soaring tuition fees, crumbling facilities and dreadful food, university students across Serbia are taking to social media and relying on a black market meal trade to fight back against conditions some have compared to a “horror movie”. For Slobodan Todosijevic, a civil engineering student in Belgrade, the declining quality in services offered by universities grates all the harder as costs continue to rise. Just last year, fees in his program jumped from 108,000 dinars to 130,000 per year ($1000 to $1,200) - a considerable sum in the Balkan nation where the median monthly wage is just 73,700 dinars.

Tuition fees do not cover textbooks or housing costs at Serbian universities, with some students also forced to pay an additional fee out of pocket to sit for exams. “The windows are in such a terrible state that when the wind blows a bit stronger, you can’t hear the lecturer. The facilities resemble a setting of a horror movie,” Todosijevic told AFP. “I think the tuition fee increase is unjustified, especially considering the studying conditions,” he said, adding that most textbooks available to students were decades old.

In the last month alone, tuition fees have been hiked at more than a dozen different programs at universities across Serbia, according to public records. Like countries across the globe, Serbia has been slammed by rising inflation, where prices averaged 12 percent higher in 2023 compared with the previous year. With little to no income, students are feeling the squeeze. “I don’t see any significant improvements at any level. I don’t know on what basis tuition fees were increased,” said Dorotea Antic, a member of the student organization STAV at the University of Novi Sad in northern Serbia.

Skipping meals

Earlier this year, STAV conducted a survey calling attention to the university’s lacklustre cafeteria system. Beset by substandard food and a limited number of facilities, the system doesn’t have enough capacity to serve the existing student body. Of the 1,356 students surveyed, 81 percent said they had skipped meals due to overcrowding. In a city with an estimated 50,000 students, more than 12,000 are eligible to eat at the university’s cafeterias, yet only one facility is operational.

“We first published the survey results on social media and then printed posters and put them up around the campus where students who eat in the cafeteria pass by, so that as many people as possible could see it,” Antic told AFP. The criticism and study published by STAV has not been warmly received by all. “When we put up the posters, there was a big commotion. There is even a video where an activist from the ruling party came to tear down our posters and insult us,” Antic added.

The Student Centre Novi Sad - an arm of the university charged with overseeing student welfare - also panned the survey. The group “rejects, as a mere fabrication and falsehood, the results of the alleged research on student dissatisfaction with the quality of food and hygiene in the student cafeteria, which was made public by a certain organization called STAV,” the centre said in a statement. To protest, students have also taken to social media, using Tiktok to describe in comedic detail the poor quality of the meals served at university cafeterias.

In the short clips, Serbian students sample the day’s fare and rate the food, with most receiving very low scores. Comments on the videos range from outright disgust to ridicule of the students expecting higher-quality meals for low prices. “I decided to start recording myself because I was following trends on TikTok and thought it would be interesting,” said Teodora Slavkovic, whose food review clips have received more than 20,000 views.

Fatigue

A black market on social media where students buy each other’s student cards to pay less for meals has also flourished, due to the lower prices for students on government-backed scholarships. To add to their woes, rents in Serbia’s two major cities Belgrade and Novi Sad have become increasingly unaffordable for students, after an influx of Russian immigrants to the Balkan country following the invasion of Ukraine. Emilija Milenkovic, a member of the student group Borba, said young people coming from other cities often have difficulty finding housing, especially with a shortage of space in dormitories.

“I’m living with my parents again and I commute almost every day depending on my university commitments, which doesn’t make me happy at all,” said Anja Gvozdenovic, a student at the University of Belgrade who moved back home last year due to the surge in rent prices. Gvozdenovic now commutes nearly 200 kilometers every day by train from her parents’ home near Novi Sad to the capital and back. “It’s the mental fatigue that becomes decisive,” she said. “I rarely manage to truly study and gather strength and concentration.” — AFP