Paying tuition wasn’t the only thing I had to think about when calculating the cost of school.
Everyone needs a place to live; students included. The struggle to find affordable student housing in the Kingston area is something I dedicated about four months to during my first year at Queens. While I eventually found what I thought was a decently priced house compared to some of my fellow Queens students, I also learned that I was getting a lot less bang for my buck than other university students in Canada.
Rent prices fluctuate from property to property and landlord to landlord, but a general rule of thumb is that the closer you are to campus, the more your rent will be. If you’re willing to take a bus to class, you can save yourself hundreds of dollarsa good portion of your rent pera month.
Since campus is so close to the downtown core of Kingston, when you pay for a house with a ‘campus tax’ what do you mean? You’re also paying for proximity to downtown.
Enrollment is increasing at Queen’s, which means that future and current students will be sharing the same amount of space among a much larger number of people.
Kingston is already a small city that still manages to have high property values, compared to other cities of its size, which in turn contributes to higher rent rates.
Thanks to sites like Rentseeker.com, which recently posted a report of average monthly rents across Canada, you can approximate how much a certain area will cost to rent in without meeting individual landlords. According to Rentseeker, the cost of living fluctuates greatly from one school to the next, and is worth taking note of when calculating the real cost of university.
Kingston isn’t the most expensive place to live, but considering that the average monthly rate is only a few hundred dollars below Toronto’s monthly rate, it’s safe to say it’s not the cheapest.
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