Scores of newly admitted students at the University of Ghana are forced to abandon their courses due to their inability to secure accommodation.

More than 15,000 students were offered admission this year into various undergraduate programmes at the university with less than 3,000 available bed spaces.

As the perennial struggle for accommodation sets in again, some students who have travelled long distances to the school without securing residence say they may have to quit altogether.

Long faces and outright despair were the most obvious expressions worn by the many frustrated students, who, just like their mates from the year before and the ones before that, cannot find accommodation after gaining admission into the University of Ghana.

“It was my dream to study at this university”, newly admitted Daniel Elijah Twum tells Joy News. But unlike anything he expected in his first few days in college, what was to be his dream school gradually became his nemesis.

“I was online around 8:50 am, but at 9:02 am, they said there were no rooms in all the halls that I chose. So I had to leave Winneba before 6 am to get here and sort it out. But there is no hope”, he said.

He had roamed the entire Legon campus for hours, dripping with sweat and the brown envelope containing his application documents, literally tearing apart. He is now thinking of abandoning his course altogether.

“I am tired. I have done everything I could. I have been moving from hall to hall and floor to floor. It’s like I have gotten the school, but I haven’t. At times, I feel like giving up. Maybe staying at home and coming back next year”, he said with obvious despair.

But Daniel is not the only student. There are more whose situation has even worsened.

But this frustration does not only stay with students. Their parents feel the pinch just as much. Aunty Ama’s daughter was not lucky with the online application. She is still yet to get a room even after close to eight hours of moving from one residential hall to the other.

“Things are not well. They said the portal was to be opened at 9 am, but we tried and couldn’t get access. So now they say the rooms are all taken. And we are coming all the way from Winneba. How is my daughter supposed to come to school all the way from Winneba to Legon every day?” she asked.

And the story is the same for thousands of other students and their parents. Indeed, most of them have had courses to explore off-campus options. Some of them are fortunate, and others, not so much.

With each passing admission window, the accommodation crisis at the University of Ghana gets worse. But how many more Daniel Elijah’s will be forced to abandon their entire university dreams owing to lack of space.

Will this be the year university management deals decisively with this problem, just so maybe this piece becomes the last of many on the same problem?