The College should never have let the housing situation get to the point where it has to bribe students to change their Dartmouth Plans less than one month before the start of Fall term.
The Enrollment Committee, on which many of the high-level College administrators sit, held a meeting last week after finding out that the College would not be able to house more than 150 students who had chosen to be on-campus for the Fall term.
The committee came up with a number of stop-gap solutions. Their ideas may or may not solve the housing crunch, but they probably will leave most people unhappy.
Students who have on-campus housing or are on the wait list and choose to change their D-Plans to take the term off will be bumped to the top of the housing and class priority lists when they return to campus.
In addition, students choosing this option will receive a 50 percent discount on their next term's housing.
This solution is unfair to all students. Why should students who are scheduled to be off this fall be bumped from their Winter term classes because the College allowed too many students to enroll in the Fall term?
This system penalizes students who did nothing more than decide to take the Fall term off by dropping their class and room priorities.
The solutions are not perfect and they come about too late. In late April, the College knew way too many people signed up to be on in the fall. In early July, Housing Assignments Administrator Lynn Rosenblum told The Dartmouth that the College would not be able to house 150 students.
Instead of immediately planning on how to deal with the impending crunch, the College crossed its collective fingers and prayed that students would decide to take Fall term off.
It is any body's guess as to whether these solutions will work. Dean of the Faculty James Wright said he does not think the plan will house all 180 people on the waiting list.
The Enrollment Committee should have acted in mid-July &emdash; some students maybe would have taken off Fall term if they had known about these advantages, but now they will not because they do not have time to find a worthwhile job or experience.
Some wait-listed students have no option &emdash; they must be in Hanover this fall because they have already taken their leave term and it is too late to get into an off-campus or transfer program.
This scenario is simply unacceptable. The College has failed in its duty to house its own students. The College continually acknowledges that it cannot guarantee housing for all of its students, but this is the first year that the College has been unable to house all its students.
And no students had any say in this decision &emdash; it was made behind closed doors by top-level administrators. Would the students have endorsed such a proposal? We will never know.
It is now too late for a solution that makes everyone happy. There will be people off this term who did not want to be off and there will be people in Hanover with nowhere to sleep at night. And then there will be angry students this winter who will not get into their academic classes because enrollment priorities have been shifted.
But the saddest thing about this whole situation is that it could have been avoided, if only the College had thought ahead.
