By Hady Sabra | Staff Writer
For over eighteen months, the American University of Beirut was a ghost town, and if you looked at bulletin boards around campus, you would see the same posters pinned up since February 2020. It almost felt apocalyptic. The silence was deafening, and the bleak desolation was incomprehensible. Thanks to the AUBe Vaccinated Campaign, AUB has been restored to its former glory as fully vaccinated AUBites return to campus for the Fall semester of 2021. The hustle and bustle around College Hall are back, club meetings are held live and in-person in West Hall auditoriums, Charles Hostler Student Center is drenched in sweat again, and the Green Oval is packed with languid students once more. The fear of missing out on the once-in-a-lifetime university experience has been allayed. In a perfect world, students would only have to stress about finals that are nothing but forty days away. But this is not a perfect world, and with the return to campus, students are burdened with suffocating expenses.
Lebanon is going through a devastating economic crisis that has crippled the majority of the population, leaving half of the Lebanese families living below the poverty line. The collapse has ravaged the people, and it is easy for anyone who is not living under a rock to tell that the adopted lifestyle in Lebanon has drastically changed. Inflation rates have threatened students as tuition fees and living expenses skyrocket. AUB’s exchange rate brings nothing new to the table this year, as it is not something students have not taken into account for a year ago. What students fail to consider is the burdening expense of their return to campus life.
Expense #1: Transportation; an expense that no AUB student can dodge. As classes and regular activities resume on-campus, students are expected to come down to AUB for the in-person lectures. AUB students come from all around Lebanon, ranging from Sidon (Saida), Nabatieh, Tripoli, and Zahlé. And these students either drove their cars to campus, pitched at the tip of Beirut’s peninsula, or took public transportation. Back in April 2021, fuel prices were at a humbling 40,000 L.L/ tank. Fast forward to today, and fuel prices have skyrocketed to almost eight times that price, standing at a whopping 300,000 LL/ tank. If students still consider driving their cars from Sidon to campus, they should account for an extra weekly charge of 500,000 L.L to attend their on-campus classes. You would think that resorting to public transportation would loosen the knot a bit, but buses and cab drivers have also inflated their charges. Pre-collapse, a bus from Sidon to Khalde would cost 2,000 L.L, and from Khalde to AUBMC would add another 1,000 L.L, totaling up to a daily 6,000 L.L to get to campus from Sidon and then back home. Today, those same buses charge 15,000 L.L from Sidon to Khalde, and 8,000 L.L from Khalde to AUBMC, amassing a staggering daily total of 46,000 L.L to get to campus and then back home. Students face no option but to suffocate under the burdening expenses to reach their classes.
Expense #2: On-campus dorms; an inevitable choice for too-far-away students. Students living in Nabatieh and Tripoli are accommodated on-campus, and while dorm prices have not shifted in past years, the inflated exchange rate has restrained the dorm-settling student with a ball and chain. At least living in an on-campus dorm is far better than living off-campus in Hamra, where students are spared no electricity, water, or Wi-Fi.
Expense #3: Food; the single easiest, and at the same time hardest, thing for students to avoid. Expenses squandered on food are probably the most controllable, as students can always pack leftovers and sandwiches in their lunchboxes to swerve the intimidating menu prices. On days where lunch boxes are left unpacked, students can rest assured that they can still manage to pay for the still-reasonable food services at AUB. The cafeteria still serves good-quality food and at very reasonable prices compared to what neighboring restaurants offer. However, food services have also been affected by the crisis. Pre-collapse, the menu used to be diverse, serving a variety of plat-du-jour ranging from lasagna and pizza to Sayadieh and Shish Barak. Moreover, menu prices were as low as 9,000 L.L for a large pizza and 6,000 L.L for sandwiches. Today, the menu has lost its diversity in options and has more than doubled the prices for its services.
With all these unprecedented expenses toppling over students’ heads, how are AUBites expected to keep it together and pull through? Instability in the country and the ever-increasing inflation rates threaten to make these expenses unmanageable. The collapse has left the Lebanese people at rock bottom, and there seems to be no uphill climb anytime soon as the economic crisis proceeds to dig the people into the burying rock. Knowing that what is yet to come is probably worse is a lancing feeling that settles deep in a student’s bones.