Eighty-Two Out of a Hundred Students: Working While Studying Is Not a Choice, It Is a Class Position

Dear Young Comrades,

On 27 October, Emek Gençliği (Labour Youth) announced the results of a face-to-face survey it carried out in Istanbul with 877 university students. The headline is short, and it is heavy: 82 out of 100 students have to work. In this piece I will summarise the survey first, and then widen it with the figures of TÜİK, Türk-İş, YÖK, the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the 2027 budget proposal, and ask: in whose hands is this picture, under whose control, and for whose benefit?

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First, the Summary

1. Working has become the rule. 50.5 per cent of students in Istanbul have worked for financial reasons during university, or are still working; 31.7 per cent are looking for work or thinking of working. Together, 82.2 per cent. Only 17.8 per cent have never worked and are not thinking of working.
2. Income is two-thirds of what is needed. 67.6 per cent of students live on 20,000 lira a month or less. The survey calculates 30,000 lira as the lower limit of living in a student flat in Istanbul.
3. The state's contribution is symbolic. The KYK grant or loan for undergraduates is 4,000 lira a month. That is 8 per cent of the monthly cost of living for a single worker, which Türk-İş calculated at 48,885 lira in September 2026, and 9 per cent of the average student rent in Istanbul (43,044 lira).
4. There is no dormitory; there is rent. Against 930,000 university students in Istanbul there are 67,677 KYK beds: 7 beds for every 100 students. Half the students (47.2 per cent) stay in the family home; this is not a choice, it is the price of getting through the university gate.
5. To study is to go into debt. 42.1 per cent of students are in debt. The debt is a chain running from the credit card to the KYK loan; university has become a door through which people enter the labour market in debt, before they even have a diploma.
6. The student is capital's cheapest and most flexible labour. 42.9 per cent of those who work are in services: cafés, supermarkets, call centres, courier work. Part-time, off the books, under-insured, the labour of people who are told "they are students anyway".
7. The question is not the absence of resources, but the direction of the resources. In the 2027 budget proposal, defence spending rises by about 1 trillion lira in one year. That increase alone would be enough to pay today's KYK amount, for about five years, to each of the 3.98 million students in formal education.
8. Poverty is not fate; lack of organisation becomes fate. The demands are plain: a grant that is unconditional and sufficient, the cancellation of KYK loan debts, decent public dormitories, free transport and food. These are won only when organised students stand side by side with organised workers.

Now let us go into the detail.

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What Does the Survey Say?

Emek Gençliği's "Survey of the Living Conditions of University Youth" was carried out face to face in Istanbul with 877 students. The report does not say from which universities the sample was drawn, or the margin of error; the figures should therefore be read not as "the exact photograph of every university student in Istanbul" but as a strong sign. As we will see below, the official figures confirm that sign.

Indicator	Rate / amount
Has worked, or is working, for financial reasons	50.5%
Looking for work, or thinking of working	31.7%
In need of work, in total	82.2%
Of those working, in the service sector	42.9%
Not satisfied with student life	61.5%
Monthly income of 20,000 lira or less	67.6%
Makes a living with family support	83.8%
Stays in the family home	47.2%
Stays in a KYK dormitory	24.5%
In debt	42.1%
Of those in debt, owing more than 10,000 lira	21.7%
Sets aside no money at all for social and cultural activity	8.3%
Can set aside at most 1,000 lira for social and cultural activity	27.6%

Source: Evrensel, 28 October 2026. Cumhuriyet's report adds these figures: the average monthly housing and food cost of those who stay in a student flat is 27,400 lira; from the second year on, 49 per cent of students are in debt, and 63.8 per cent of students who work.

Let us look at two details.

First, the relation between income group and housing. 69.7 per cent of students whose monthly income is 1,000 to 10,000 lira stay in the family home. For the poorest student, that is, "university" means studying in the city where the family lives, often travelling for hours from the neighbourhood where the family lives. The preference list is narrowed by the rent calculation before it is even filled in.

Second, the relation between working and going into debt. Among students who work, indebtedness rises to 63.8 per cent. This can look strange at first glance: does the person who works not go into less debt? No; because the gap that pushes the student to work is too large to be closed by the wage. Working does not prevent the debt; it only slows the speed at which the debt grows.

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Let Us Enlarge the Figures: The Picture at the Scale of Türkiye

A survey takes a photograph of one city. Official figures give that photograph its frame.

The grant and the loan: what is 4,000 lira enough for?

The KYK grant and loan for an undergraduate has been 4,000 lira a month since January 2026 (in 2025 it was 3,000 lira). KYK is the state's Higher Education Credit and Dormitories Institution. No new increase has yet been announced for 2026–2027. Let us set this amount beside a few measures:

Measure	Amount	The share KYK covers
Türk-İş, the monthly cost of living of a single worker (September 2026)	48,885 lira	8.2%
Average student rent in Istanbul (Emlakjet/Endeksa, June 2026)	43,044 lira	9.3%
Türk-İş, the hunger line for a family of four (September 2026)	37,801 lira	—
The per-person share of the hunger line (÷4)	≈ 9,450 lira	42%
Net minimum wage (2026)	28,075 lira	14.2%
The survey's lower limit of living in a student flat in Istanbul	30,000 lira	13.3%

Sources: Türk-İş, September 2026, the Emlakjet/Endeksa student-rent study, the 2026 minimum wage.

Let us say it plainly: the grant the state gives does not even cover half of a student's food alone. Rent, transport, books, a phone and the internet stay outside the account. And for most students this money is not a grant but a loan; that is, a debt to be repaid after graduation. In Eğitim-İş's September 2026 survey, 91 per cent of those who receive the KYK grant say the money does not cover their monthly expenses; and 64 per cent of students receive no KYK grant at all (Anka).

Dormitories: 7 beds for every 100 students in Istanbul

According to YÖK, the Council of Higher Education, there were 3,981,095 students in formal higher education in 2025–2026. According to the Ministry of Youth and Sports, as of 31 December 2025 the total capacity in 875 KYK dormitories was 1,003,259 beds (official figures compiled by Anka).

	Students in formal education	KYK beds	Beds per 100 students
Türkiye	3,981,095	1,003,259	≈ 25
Istanbul	930,565	67,677	≈ 7

While in the Türkiye average one bed falls to every four students, in Istanbul, where almost a quarter of the student population studies, this rate falls to one in fourteen. Who fills the gap? Either the family home, or a rented student flat, or private dormitories and the dormitories of religious communities and orders. The housing gap is a public void left to the market and to religious networks. In every field the public withdraws from, either capital or a religious community organises.

Rent: a 39 per cent rise in a year

According to research Emlakjet carried out with Endeksa data, the average rent in student-dense districts of Istanbul was 43,044 lira in June 2026; 35,300 lira for 1+1 flats, a yearly rise of 39 per cent (Ekotürk). Ankara is 32,172 lira, Izmir 31,757. It is no coincidence that, in the Eğitim-İş survey, 71 per cent of students who rent a flat live with a housemate: a student paying the rent alone is even less possible than a minimum-wage worker paying the rent alone.

The young person who works, the young person who is unemployed, the young person who is "neither"

According to TÜİK's bulletin Youth in Statistics 2025:

• There are 12.7 million young people in the 15–24 age group; 14.8 per cent of the population.
• 23.3 per cent of young people are neither in education nor in employment; among young women the rate is 30.9 per cent.
• The net enrolment rate in higher education is 46.3 per cent.

The September 2026 labour-force figures, announced on 27 October, the same day as the survey, show:

• Unemployment at ages 15–24 is 14.8 per cent; a rise of 1.6 points in one month. Among young women, 23.3 per cent.
• The broadly defined rate of idle labour power is 31.2 per cent.

Look at the contradiction in this picture: on one side young people who cannot find work, on the other young people who have to work before they finish school. The two are the two faces of the same mechanism. By working while they study, at a low wage, part-time and uninsured, students form the most mobile battalion of the industrial reserve army in the labour market. When they graduate, most of them go on working in the same café, the same call centre, this time as "graduates". We discussed this in detail, through the gap between the narrow and the broad definition, in the piece on the TÜİK labour-force figures.

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The Student-Worker: The Class Meaning of This Picture

"Student" is not a class

Being a student is not a class position; it is a temporary social condition. Of two students sitting in the same lecture hall, one comes to the campus by car from a flat the family has bought; the other gets up at 6 in the morning, comes by two changes of transport, and in the evening goes into the night shift at a café. One's summer holiday is an internship and a programme abroad; the other's summer holiday is a full-time job. The survey shows us that this distinction is no longer the exception but the rule: only 17.8 per cent of university students in Istanbul can say "I am not thinking of working at all".

The university, in short, does not abolish the class division in society; it carries it into the lecture hall. We saw this in Whom Is the University For? and in The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone, which we wrote at the start of the school year: the educational institution is presented as a ladder that equalises; in reality it is a sieve that reproduces classes.

Why is student labour valuable to capital?

The service sector (42.9 per cent) likes student labour, because this labour has four features:

1. It is cheap. It is said that "they are working for pocket money"; the wage is set not at the level that reproduces a person's life, but on the assumption that "the family is supporting them anyway". The family's support (83.8 per cent) in fact subsidises a part of the wage the employer does not pay.
2. It is flexible. Shifts broken up according to the course timetable, hours that lengthen and shorten according to the employer's demand. Flexibility here is the freedom of the employer, not of the worker.
3. It is temporary. The thought "I will leave when I graduate" is the strongest reason for postponing the claim of rights at the workplace. The worker who thinks they are temporary does not organise.
4. It is off the books, or incompletely registered. The social-security contribution for part-time work is often paid short, or not paid at all.

When these four features come together, student labour becomes the natural raw material of the platform and gig economy. Courier work, day jobs that come through an app, piece-rate targets in a call centre… The algorithmic management we described in the Gig Economy Dossier is tested most of all on the backs of these young people.

Lost time: the free time that studying requires

Marx says that the room a person needs in order to develop is "free time": the time left outside the working day, in which a person develops themselves. The university was, historically, such a time granted to youth. That 8.3 per cent in the survey can set aside no money at all for social and cultural activity, and 27.6 per cent can set aside at most 1,000 lira, shows that this time is being taken away. Every hour that cannot be spared for the theatre, a concert, a book or a student society is not only an individual loss; it is an hour deducted from a generation's capacity to think, to argue and to organise. A tired student does not ask questions; they pass the exam, but they do not ask questions.

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Debt: The Promissory Note That Comes Before the Diploma

In the survey, 42.1 per cent of students are in debt; among those who work, the rate is 63.8 per cent. The largest item of this debt is most of the time invisible, because it is perceived as something like a "grant": the KYK study loan.

The function of the KYK loan has three layers:

• The economic layer: Where the state should support a public right (education) without a return, it turns it into a debt relation. The student, before receiving a diploma, becomes a debtor whose creditor is the state.
• The disciplinary layer: The indebted graduate loses bargaining power when choosing a job. The anxiety of "I will do whatever job there is" is born of the debt-repayment calendar. Debt is a disciplinary tool of the labour market.
• The ideological layer: Debt individualises. The feeling "I took it, I will pay it" hides the fact that the problem is a question of public policy.

The demand to "turn KYK loans into grants and cancel existing debts" is therefore not a demand for charity; it is the demand to take education out of the debt relation and put it back into the field of public rights.

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The Budget: Is There No Money, or Is the Money Somewhere Else?

The point underlined in Emek Gençliği's statement was the 2027 budget proposal. The figures of the proposal submitted to parliament on 25 October are as follows (figures soL compiled from the budget proposal):

Item	2026	2027 proposal	Increase
Total budget	18.93 trillion lira	27.28 trillion lira	44%
Defence	1.20 trillion lira	2.21 trillion lira	≈ 84%
Ministry of National Defence	823 billion lira	1.53 trillion lira	86%
Purchase of arms and military equipment	—	—	229% (the statement of Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz)
The programme of fighting poverty and social assistance	—	833 billion lira	—
Education (nominal)	—	—	26.5% (≈ 1.5% in real terms)

The government says "the largest share goes to education" and announces that 13.7 per cent of the budget is allocated to education (CNBC-e). But it is not the size of the share that shows the policy; it is the direction of the increase: while education stands still in real terms, defence almost doubles in one year. This increase is the reflection in the budget of the promise, given at the Ankara NATO Summit in July 2026, to "reach 3.5 per cent before 2030".

Let us make a rough calculation. The one-year increase in defence is about 1 trillion lira.

• Paying 48,000 lira a year (4,000 lira a month) to each of the 3.98 million students in formal education comes to about 191 billion lira.
• The increase in defence alone, that is, would be enough to pay today's grant amount to all students in formal education for more than five years.
• Or the same increase is equivalent to adding about 21,000 lira to each student's monthly support; that would carry KYK above the hunger line and close to the rent threshold.

This calculation is rough; budget items cannot be transferred directly from one to another. But what it wants to show is certain: the problem is not the absence of resources, but in whose benefit the resources are directed. The arms industry is a field of capital accumulation; a significant part of defence spending flows through the Defence Industry Support Fund, which sits outside the budget and outside parliamentary control. A student grant, by contrast, leaves society not a profit for capital but a qualified person. The budget is the struggle of the classes over resources, set down in figures.

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What Is Said, and What Is Real

The official discourse	What the figures show
"We provide our young people with every opportunity."	4,000 lira a month for an undergraduate; 8 per cent of a single person's cost of living.
"Dormitory capacity has passed 1 million."	In Istanbul, 7 beds for every 100 students.
"Our students receive a grant if they wish."	64 per cent of students receive no KYK grant; for 91 per cent of those who do, it is not enough.
"Working while a student builds experience."	42.9 per cent of those who work are in services; not experience, a livelihood.
"The largest share of the budget goes to education."	Education rises 1.5 per cent in real terms, defence 84 per cent.
"Youth is our future."	23.3 per cent of young people are neither in education nor in employment, and 14.8 per cent are unemployed.

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Three Questions

In whose hands? Housing is in the hands of the market and of religious-community networks; student labour is in the hands of employers in the service sector; the student's future is in the hands of a promissory note.

Under whose control? It is not students who set the amount of the grant, the dormitory capacity and the budget priorities, but an executive that looks to the NATO commitment and to the profitability of capital. The student has no say in these decisions.

For whose benefit? For the benefit of the employer who finds cheap and flexible labour, the property owner who gains from the rise in rent, the bank that gains from the interest on credit, and the arms industry. Not for the student's.

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Concrete Tasks

Lamenting this picture is not enough. What can be done:

1. Produce your own data. What Emek Gençliği did is an example. In your department, in your dormitory, in the student flat, ask the same questions: how many people work, for how many hours, for how much money, are they insured? Data is the map of organising.
2. If you work, you are a worker. The student who works in a café, a supermarket or a call centre is a potential member of that sector's union. The part-time worker too has the right to a union, the right to insurance, the right to overtime. Learn these, and share them with your workmates.
3. Build a solidarity network in the dormitory and in the flat. A shared kitchen, shared shopping, a shared pool of books: these are not only saving, they are the first school of acting together.
4. Make the demands common.
   • A sufficient and unconditional grant for every university student;
   • KYK loans turned into grants, and existing debts cancelled;
   • The spread of decent, secular, free public dormitories;
   • Free transport, and three meals on campus, free or at cost;
   • A ceiling on student rents, and public housing.
5. Follow the budget debates. While the 2027 budget is debated in parliament, a simple table that sets the education and defence items side by side will do what thousands of slogans cannot. Share this table on campus, on social media, with your classmates.
6. Bring the student together with the worker. The student's family, too, is mostly a wage-earner. The demand for a grant and the demand for a wage are parts of the same budget and the same struggle. Join, as a student, the actions of the unions in the budget and minimum-wage periods; invite them to your demands at the university.

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Dear Young Comrades,

That eighty-two out of a hundred students have to work is not a "student problem". It is the children of the class that lives by its labour being pulled to the lowest rung of the labour market before they even have a profession. University is told to these young people as a door of salvation; but the price of passing through the door is the night shift, the loan debt, and the load that falls on the family's back.

The sentence in Emek Gençliği's statement is right: the poverty and the indebtedness of university students are not fate. The only thing that is fate is the lack of organisation; everyone who is unorganised is condemned to live according to other people's decisions. The budget was not written on a single day; it is written again every year. Who will write it depends on whose voice comes out louder.

Those who have to work while they study know what work is. Turning that knowledge into an organised force is our job.

The machine is new, the chain is old. But it has always been new generations who break the chain.

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