The Resident Life Department’s new attitude toward students canceling their housing contracts is self-serving rather than student-focused. Resident Life, as reported in a story in The Diamondback last week (“Res Life: No more contract canceling,” Nov. 29), will attempt to fill empty beds on the campus in the spring by forbidding students to cancel their housing contracts. This policy only reveals a lack of planning by the department.
Previously, the university has had to deal with a shortage, rather than a surplus, of housing. Although it is nice students will not have to be put on a waitlist, breaking the trend of on-campus housing for the past few years, this new rigid rule gives students fewer options and forces them to stick with a housing plan of which they don’t want to be a part.
Room and board at the university is more than $8,000 a year – a big investment for many families. Students often have to get financial aid just to be able to live at the university and attend classes. When students and their families decide to shell out that much money for on-campus housing, they should receive satisfactory results and should be viewed as customers rather than slaves to Resident Life.
A student can have many reasons for not wanting to continue living on the campus: a bad roommate, lack of funds, a desire to have a house or nicer conditions or disenchantment with the housing situation and the required meal plan. The university should work to make students feel supported and comfortable here, instead of forcing them to continue living in a situation they do not desire.
Unfortunately, both the surplus of housing and the previous shortage are because of Resident Life’s poor planning. The department has chronically been wrong in its prediction of how many students will request housing and in its planning of how to accommodate those students. Now, instead of being put on a waitlist for housing – an action students actually want – students will be forced to stay in housing situations they do not want.
Students being bullied by Resident Life and being put in undesirable living situations will not be a new thing in the spring. Last fall, 72 students were put in a hotel for the beginning of the semester because of an overbooking of on-campus housing. While it may sound like a luxury, it actually got the semester off to a rocky start for many students.
Andrew Benenati, a sophomore architecture major, was an incoming freshman last fall and one of many students who lived in a hotel during the beginning of the semester. Unlike the typical going-away-to-college experience, Benenati’s parents dropped him and his things off at the UMUC Inn and Conference Center and said their goodbyes.
Benenati was informed in a letter attached to his housing agreement that he was in a low priority group and would not be guaranteed on-campus housing for his first semester. He said the only apology in the letter was a brief “sorry for the inconvenience.”
“It would have been nice to know more ahead of time,” Benenati’s father, Luciano, says of the experience. Although grateful his son did not have to commute his first week at the university, Luciano believes that the university should work on “better planning.”
Benenati lived in the hotel for a week before being transferred to Denton Hall. “It was a big inconvenience to move him twice,” Luciano said.
Benenati was fortunate to move into a double room. Other students who started out in the hotel were eventually moved into lounges in the high-rise dorms after no other housing options developed.
With a history of expecting students (who pay for the housing and meal plan) to be flexible about their living situations, it is amazing Resident Life is going to develop a policy that is so inflexible toward students’ needs. The department should make student satisfaction its No. 1 priority and should develop better strategies for predicting how many students will need housing. If Resident Life fails in its predictions, students should not be the ones who suffer.
Keri Fulton is a junior journalism major. She can be reached at keri@wam.umd.edu.
