Students Wonder If Change to Housing Requirement Will Change Room Selection Process
By Katie Ward
Catholic University students are preparing for one of the most stressful parts of spring semester: figuring out their housing for the next school year. New changes to the housing requirements have increased anxieties for students about the housing process.
Students who have gone through the housing application process in previous years know of the struggles within the system: the friend group drama, the lack of guaranteed housing for every grade, and the awkward remainder of the semester between two roommates who definitely will not be living together next year. Students compete to win a double-zero number in housing bingo and “Minute to Win It” events. After the fateful day where housing goes live, class Facebook groups are filled with posts asking for extra rooms or one more person to fill a unit. And the recent change to the on-campus housing requirement might necessitate a modification to the housing process, as students will now be required to live on campus for three academic years instead of the previous requirement for two.
The current housing system has not been assessed by students since a Town Hall held in October 2012, which gathered feedback from the campus community. Four different systems were considered— academic performance based; custom/points based, which awarded “priority points for responsible and active participation in the campus community”; “first-come, first-served”, which took into account the date the application was received and housing availability; and random lottery system, which gave no individual priority.
After a presentation on the different options for the housing process, “students described the current system of random assignment as fair in the sense that it gives no preference to a particular student or group of students,” according to the Office of Housing article. The university also collected responses from 30 other universities on their processes, of which 20 responded that they used a similar random assignment system. Such a town hall meeting to collect student feedback on room selection has not been held since October 2012, confirmed Jessica Bediako, the Associate Director for the Office of Housing Services.
With the new requirement for incoming students to live on campus for three years, questions have arisen about the space required and changes to the room selection process. The university has not announced yet whether it will “grandfather” in the current freshmen and allow them to move off campus their junior year, but Cardinal Ambassadors, student tour guides, have included the new requirement in their script to prospective students.
According to housing numbers, the new requirement just isn’t feasible at the moment— in fact, about 500 beds will have to be added to accommodate the larger number of students required to remain on campus, about the equivalent of another Centennial Village. The Office of Housing has not yet announced its plan to house three grades of students, but new units of housing will have to be added to the existing 2,028 to house the approximately 2,500 students who will begin to be required to remain on campus. There has also not been an announcement yet about whether seniors, graduate students, and “non-traditional students” will have availability to live on campus.
“The change to the residency requirement is still being reviewed,” Bediako said. “The Room Selection process would be reviewed and updated, if necessary, to align with any changes in residential needs. Academic designation of the residence halls is determined year-to-year based on the number of students set to live on campus and anticipated enrollment numbers. Based on the anticipated numbers for on-campus housing, Housing Services will initiate plans accordingly.”
