The summer vacation feel still lingered on Tuesday, August 26, across the campus of Université Paris Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine). On part of its 32 hectares, which welcome some 35,000 students each year, stood a cluster of student residences with most shutters closed. Just days before the start of the academic year, only the hum of electric trimmers, cutting back overgrown lawns, disturbed the late summer calm.

Eva Caron, 18, pulled her suitcase along the pavement toward one of the buildings belonging to the Centre régional des Œuvres universitaires et scolaires (Crous, the French national student services organization). She had traveled from Montreuil-sur-Mer (northern France), a two-hour drive away, and was preparing to move in to begin a dual degree in art history, archaeology, and anthropology at this university – the only one to offer such a program. Her mother and grandfather came with her.

Upon discovering the small, 10-square-meter room equipped with a loft bed, desk, mini-fridge, closet, shower room, and a tiny balcony just big enough for one person, the family expressed their satisfaction. "Honestly, we have nothing to complain about," said her mother, Audrey Martel, a childcare worker. "It's a stroke of luck that she was accepted at the Crous here. Finding housing nearby wouldn't have been affordable for us. She wouldn't have been able to take the course, and we would have tried again to apply to Lille [for a single-subject degree]."

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