After several years of Fall-term housing crunches, the Office of Residential Life easily cleared its waitlist, offering on-campus housing to all students who applied on time this year.
ORL offered all students on-campus housing by July 21, said Bud Beatty, assistant dean of residential life. Last year, more than 100 students were on the waitlist at the end of August.
There was no housing crunch this fall because of less demand for on-campus housing and lower Fall-term enrollment, administrators say. The lack of housing problems this fall is a victory for the Enrollment Committee, which last winter and spring instituted a host of measures to try to dissuade students from being on campus in the most popular term by essentially limiting the flexibility of the Dartmouth Plan.
There are currently 3,738 students enrolled for Fall term, according to Registrar Thomas Bickel. At the same time last year, 3,837 students were enrolled.
Most administrators said they are pleased with the relaxed housing situation. Dean of the Faculty James Wright, who chairs the Enrollment Committee, said the College will likely continue to limit D-Plan flexibility in the near future.
"We can't permit everyone to select four [Fall] terms in residence," he said. "We will continue to encourage people to think of other options."
Beatty said ORL received significantly fewer applications for on-campus housing for this fall. This year, about 1,750 students applied for on-campus housing, while more than 2,000 applied for on-campus housing last fall.
These application numbers do not include freshmen, who are guaranteed housing for their first three terms at the College.
In total, about 2,770 of the College's 2,809 on-campus beds are filled, Beatty said. On-campus space includes rooms in all residence halls and special-interest and affinity program housing, but does not include the approximately 400 students living in Coed Fraternity Sorority houses.
The housing waitlist started at 132 students in May, compared with more than 430 a year earlier, Director of Housing Services Lynn Rosenblum said.
The smaller waitlist is a result of the suggestions made by a temporary committee formed to investigate the housing crunches last year, Beatty said. The College created the committee last fall to look for better ways to manage enrollment and to reduce the demand for Fall-term housing.
Based on recommendations made by the ad-hoc committee, the Enrollment Committee suggested moving more off-campus programs to the fall and popular Fall-term classes to other terms, and shifting fall-winter sequence classes to a winter-spring format.
The Enrollment Committee, a committee made up of many top administrators, also suggested in the spring that some students not receive their first choice D-Plan. Also, some students who wished to change their D-Plans to be enrolled for the Fall term were given "provisional" enrollment status.
Students who had provisional status had the choice of either switching their pattern to a leave term or waiting and trying to find off-campus housing. Those students who were able to find housing were able to enroll for the fall.
Bickel said the Enrollment Committee created the provisional status to let students know where they stood from the beginning.
"We wanted to keep the Fall-term enrollment down and we felt we needed to stop people from changing to an 'R' in the Fall if they didn't already have it," Bickel said. "The Enrollment Committee decided to let students know where they stand and let them find their own housing, and if they do then they can switch to an 'R.' "
This year, about 125 students were assigned provisional status, Bickel said. He said the number is now down to 12, and the rest of the students either found housing or decided not to enroll.
Bickel said he is satisfied there is no housing crunch this fall, though he added enrollment is "still a little high," and the College would rather not assign students provisional status.
"We'd rather just let everyone do what they want to, but it wasn't working ... We're more or less planning on continuing the same thing for '96 fall," Bickel said.
"We were happy to get everyone in and settled as early as we did," Beatty said. "I think we're on the right track."
Another reason for the relaxed housing situation this fall is the increased number of students on off-campus programs this term, Bickel said. This fall 188 students are on off-campus programs, as compared to 153 last fall.
Beatty said the reduction in enrollment and demand for Fall-term housing is not directly correlated to the new housing process instituted this spring. The new housing process gave each student one randomly chosen priority number for housing, with seniors receiving top priority and sophomores receiving lowest priority.
The new housing process sent many members of the Class of 1998 scurrying to find off-campus housing because they were afraid they would not get housing on campus.
"I think there was some unfortunate information that went out from upperclassmen to '98s," Beatty said. "I know even though they tried to correct for some of that information, some people had already panicked and gone off campus for places to live."
But Beatty said he thinks some of the sophomores who went off campus could have been housed by the College.
"I'd certainly think that given how we've ended up here in the Fall term, we could have helped some of the people who panicked and decided to go off campus," Beatty said.
