The university’s era of denying students housing may be coming to an end, thanks to a new online room selection process that was made available to students for the first time this year.
Department of Resident Life officials said they hope the new process will lead to more on-campus housing for upperclassmen, a group of students who have frequently been denied housing for more than 10 years.
The new program placed 4,100 students in on-campus rooms without any major technological glitches, Resident Life officials said. The program, which was launched in March, was designed to allow students to rank the rooms they wanted in order of preference while the system assigned them rooms according to their preferences. Students could rank as many rooms as they wanted – one student ranked 216 rooms.
“I was nervous in March,” said Scott Young, assistant director of administrative and business services for Resident Life. “My biggest fear was that it wouldn’t assign anybody or would break down halfway through.”
While not all of the more than 5,000 students who requested on-campus housing could be assigned a room, 4,100 students were given an opportunity to live on the campus, including 900 more rising juniors than the department placed last year. More than 1,000 rising juniors were invited to participate in the room selection process, a big jump from last year’s 136, Young said. More than 500 juniors will live in on-campus housing in the fall.
“I would always say there’s a housing crisis, but this year, it was definitely not as acute,” Young said. “We still had to turn some people away, but we were actually able to invite [more] upperclassmen than we originally had after we realized some hadn’t opted into room selection.”
But many students and officials voiced their discontent with the new “snapshot application” – a feature that, while not operating in real time, frequently refreshes the list of available rooms as students make their selections, enabling students to monitor room availability. Several students who used the application thought they were guaranteed a certain room but later find out, as the page refreshed, that the rooms they wanted had already been taken.
“We called it the ‘eBay phenomenon,'” Young said. “I thought it was better to have that feature, but there was a huge debate among [officials] whether or not to keep it in place.”
Young said that students provided very quick feedback and that a database administrator was able to correct most of the technical problems in a matter of minutes.
Late last year, Resident Life decided to design its own program for room selection, allowing the department to spend less money on revamping the room selection process and to instead possibly channel the money it saved toward student programs, events and activities.
The final part of the new system will be the “room exchange” program, with which students who have already chosen rooms will be able to view rooms that are empty or swap rooms with students who wish to do the same. The online room exchange feature be available this summer.
Resident Life officials said that with the completion of South Campus Commons Building 7 and Oakland Hall, they hope to be able to guarantee four years of housing for more students.
“The future is looking bright,” Young said. “We’re definitely beginning to reverse the trend.”
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