The College must stop ignoring the annual fall housing crunch and do something to alleviate it instead of telling students that it "will do what it can" to help them find off-campus living arrangements.
There were 423 students on the Office of Resdidential Life's Fall-term housing waitlist at the beginning of the summer and 278 were still on it this past Wednesday.
Housing Assignments Administrator Lynn Rosenblum said she expects only about 100 spots to open up between now and the beginning of fall, leaving almost 180 students to forage for off-campus housing.
And this is not an isolated incident. The shortage is becoming as predictable as the autumn leaves changing their colors and the College is doing little to solve it.
Indeed, in the last few years, the number of people on the Fall-term housing waitlist has been growing. In 1992, 170 students were on the waitlist; 370 students in 1993 and a record number 423 this year.
So far, the College has done nothing to deal with the housing problem. But the problem is not going away and is only getting worse.
The College should start addressing this problem by building another dormitory to accommodate all the students who want to be on campus in the fall and enforcing a limit on the number of students on-campus Fall term.
The idea to build a new dormitory is not a novel one. The Committee on the First-Year Experience, chaired and created by Dean of the College Lee Pelton, recommended the construction of a new dormitory in a report released this spring.
However, Pelton, in an interview with The Dartmouth, said the earliest a new dormitory will be built based on the First-Year Committee's recommendations is 1996. Students cannot wait until 1996. A new dorm is needed as soon as possible. The College should start planning and soliciting money for the project now.
In the meantime, the College should pursue other ways to solve the fall housing crisis. This fall, 3,904 students will be on-campus, about 90 percent of Dartmouth's total student body.
The College needs to limit the number of students on in the fall. According to Associate Registrar Nancy Broadhead, the College used to do this, but has not done so in the past two to three years.
It is time to start again.
If the College enforces a cap and its policy of allowing petitions to be on campus a certain term for only what Broadhead described as "valid academic reasons," the housing crunch can be lessened considerably.
Surely not all of the 3,900 students who want to be on-campus this fall have a "valid academic reason."
Departments should also try to offer required or popular courses that are currently only offered in the fall in other terms to reduce the number students who want or need to be on in the fall.
By capping Fall-term enrollment and starting to plan for a new dorm, the College can take a step forward and show students that it recognizes the problem and is doing things to correct it.
