The living room wasn’t meant to be a bedroom, but it’s the only space Ibrahim Mohammed can afford. His mattress sits against one wall beside a folding table that doubles as his study desk. There are no doors for privacy, and the kitchen light spills into the space where he sleeps.
It is not what he pictured when he left India for graduate school.
Mohammed, 25, pays $460 a month for that corner of a Graduate Hills apartment adjacent to the University of Maryland. The whole two-bedroom unit costs a little over $1,700 after an 18% discount the complex offers graduate students. His rent is low only because he sleeps in the hall. “It’s a huge degradation from how I lived back home,” said the data science master’s student at the university.
“Rent takes everything,” he said, with most of his $18-an-hour campus wages gone as soon as they come in. “I work in the catering section at Stamp [Student Union] between classes,” he said, a workload that “does hamper education.” He covers his tuition with a loan he took in India.
Mohammed’s experience reflects the pressures facing many of university’s graduate students. Riley Lankes, a Ph.D. student and an organizer with the Graduate Labor Union, said many graduate students are priced out of the College Park rental market and forced to live farther from campus, increasing commute times and transportation costs, while cutting into time for teaching, research and coursework.
The union has called on the university to raise graduate stipends, create guaranteed on-campus housing for grad students and cap rents in university-affiliated housing at a level tied to stipends. Union leaders say their rent should not exceed one-third of a graduate assistant’s income.
The university has taken steps to address graduate pay, even as it acknowledges that housing costs remain “a challenge in the Washington region,” said Dennis Passarella-George, campus director of Resident Life. The university sets a minimum graduate assistant stipend each year “to meet or exceed the university’s cost of attendance as calculated by the Office of Student Financial Aid,” with individual schools encouraged “to offer higher, discipline-specific pay,” he said.
The university increased minimum graduate assistant stipends by 64% between fall 2019 and fall 2025, Passarella-George said, including a 1% cost-of-living adjustment this academic year, amid what he described as “significant budget challenges.”
Still, students say housing costs continue to outpace those increases. Roughly 10,592 graduate students, including 4,232 grad assistants, are enrolled at Maryland, university data show, and Lankes said many of those assistants’ stipends “fall short in College Park’s rental market.” He pays around $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment near campus, he said, while taking home roughly $2,100 after taxes for his 20-hour-per-week assistantship in the College of Information.
Federal housing guidelines recommend spending no more than 30 percent of a household’s income on rent, a benchmark that the Graduate Labor Union has adopted in its call for affordable housing. A first-year graduate student on a full assistantship earns a minimum of $35,074 for a 12-month appointment, requiring about 20 hours of work a week, graduate school data for fiscal 2025 show. Thirty percent of that $2,917 monthly income would mean about $877 a month is available for rent.
It is rare to find stable housing in College Park — aside from improvised arrangements like Mohammed’s — that a graduate student can afford, Lankes said. “If my partner didn’t help me with half of the rent, I couldn’t cover my expenses,” he said.
One-bedroom apartments in College Park average $1,600 to $1,900, according to RentCafe, Apartments.com and Zillow. Two-bedroom units run $2,000 to $2,400, these sites show, and students often end up paying $1,000 to $1,400 per person for a single room in a shared apartment.
Those with part-time hourly campus jobs, like Mohammed, bring home even less each month than the graduate assistants. And for international students, federal rules restrict employment to only on-campus jobs for no more than 20 hours a week.
The university enrolled between 3,400 and 3,800 international graduate students over the past two years, according to International Student Services data.
Over the past decade, a wave of luxury-style student housing has risen along Route 1 — 16 complexes in total, according to College Park Mayor Fazlul Kabir and Nick DiSpirito, the campus student liaison to the College Park City Council.
City Councilmember Denise Mitchell (District 4) said recent development patterns have pushed many students farther from Route 1 and the main campus. “The current housing stock is driving up the prices,” she said.
She said the strain now extends beyond the university to become a regionwide affordability issue. Rising rents across the region, she said, have pushed some students “from American, Georgetown, Howard and Bowie State [universities] into College Park.”
Passarella-George said the city offers a “wide range of housing options,” including apartments and rental homes, and said many graduate students prefer “independent, apartment-style living.” University-owned residence halls prioritize undergraduates in their first two years, he said, while graduate students have been directed to university-affiliated but privately owned housing operated by Southern Management Cos. at Graduate Hills and Graduate Gardens.
Those two complexes, located next to campus, offer a total of about 475 units. Published floor-plan pricing lists rents at about $1,422 for a studio, $1,650 for a one-bedroom and $1,970 for a two-bedroom — before an 18% discount available to university graduate students through the university’s partnership with the operator.
The university’s partnership with Southern Management helps students avoid “application fees and credit-check requirements often imposed by off-campus landlords,” Passarella-George said.
Additionally, the university provides “a number of resources” to support international graduate students in their housing search, he added. Students can also seek guidance from the International Student and Scholar Services office and Graduate Legal Aid.
Students should weigh “distance, amenities, and the type of living environment they prefer,” adding that “at times, cost may need to outweigh the convenience of being located immediately adjacent to the university,” Passarella-George said.
When somewhat ‘affordable’ housing comes with inconvenience
For Ph.D. student Rahayu Adzhar, the affordability gap became clear even before she arrived on campus. Lab members told her Graduate Hills and Graduate Gardens were the only relatively cheaper options for graduate students, she said.
She put her name on the waitlist. It never moved.
Instead, she bypassed the system by taking over someone else’s lease: a $1,040 studio apartment at Graduate Hills. The price was considered “modest” because of the discount, she said, but it ate up nearly half of her monthly after-tax income of about $2,100.
Issues began immediately, Adzhar said: The heating and cooling were “often dysfunctional,” the basement unit smelled damp, and plumbing problems routinely made the shower barely usable.
Maintenance staff fixed individual issues, like a broken shower nozzle, but later, she said, when another issue erupted, she decided to move out.
Finding affordable alternatives was no easier for her.
Adzhar now rents a $1,000 basement in a single-family home in Hyattsville. It is cleaner and quieter, she said, but several miles from campus. And transportation is becoming harder to manage.
Campus transportation services cut back the Hyattsville shuttle runs, from about five daily a year ago, according to archived schedules, to three times a day now. Adzhar said she often has to pay for rideshares to get to class.
Adzhar, who is also a member of the Graduate Labor Union, said the university should “provide more student housing,” including guaranteed on-campus options for at least “30 to 50% of the graduate student population,” and rents in university-affiliated housing of no more than a third of the lowest graduate stipend.
“If we are struggling every month to pay rent and buy our groceries, we cannot focus on research or education,” she said.
A system not built for affordability
College Park officials say the affordability crisis has been a decade in the making.
Mitchell said that historically, the city hadn’t differentiated between student housing need and general affordable housing need. “As long as I’ve been on the council, we never thought about student housing needs,” she said.
For years, she said, the city relied on the city–university partnership to discuss availability of student housing along Route 1, particularly for “undergraduate students who have to leave dorms after sophomore year.” But beyond that, she said, “there really hasn’t been definitive stakeholder work on student affordability.”
Kabir, the mayor, agreed new construction along Route 1 has skewed upscale. “Most of the developments are not in the affordable category based on the standard definition of affordability,” he said.
Part of the reason rents remain high, Kabir said, is that landlords have broad latitude. “Property owners can set the rent as they wish,” he said. “We cannot directly control rent. These are private entities. We don’t own them.”
He said the lack of affordability is “not acceptable.”
Mitchell said the city lacks a key tool that might otherwise help.
“The city doesn’t have land-use authority,” she said. “We can’t control zoning. The county holds that power, and they’ve resisted letting municipalities have it.” Because of that, she said, College Park has little ability to influence what kinds of housing get built or to push developers toward affordability.
Kabir said the city is doing what it can by updating its Revitalization Tax Credit Program, which encourages developers to set aside affordable units in exchange for reduced city taxes. “We are sacrificing some tax revenue so these units can be affordable,” he said, noting the specifics are “negotiated case by case.”
Unfortunately, city student liaison DiSpirito said, “Landlords also use the timing of the market to their advantage.” Many complexes, he said, push students to renew leases for the following year almost as soon as they move in, while most single-family rentals don’t hit the market until late spring.
DiSpirito and fellow liaison Amira Abujuma have pressed for an ordinance that would bar landlords from requiring renewals more than 180 days before a lease ends. “It’s about restoring freedom of choice,” DiSpirito said. The council delayed a vote on the proposal until February.
Students with nowhere else to turn can contact the Thrive Center for Essential Needs, which supports those facing housing, food or financial emergencies, said the center’s case manager, Chamika Ellis. The center’s assistance includes emergency break housing, emergency grants, meal swipes, financial-aid interventions and connections to Prince George’s County youth homelessness programs when on-campus housing is not available, she said.
Ellis said the center routinely works with international, LGBTQ+, and Black and Latino students, as well as graduate students whose incomes “do not stretch far enough.”
“We’re trying to fill gaps,” she said. “But the need is bigger than what we can cover.”
Mehedi Marof and Cameron Crossett are graduate journalism students at the University of Maryland.
Republished with permission from our news partner Maryland Matters.