The Office of Residential Life recommended the College consider constructing a new 125 to 225-bed residential facility and requiring sophomores to live on-campus, in a report released yesterday.
The report, commissioned by Dean of the College Lee Pelton to investigate the future housing needs of the College, addressed four major issues: residence hall occupancy; quality of life; coed, fraternity, sorority housing, and off-campus housing.
These issues have been "hampering the College's ability to provide first rate residential life services to its undergraduates," according to the report.
Associate Dean of Residential Life Bud Beatty, who prepared the report with Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco, said Pelton will determine how the College will respond to the recommendations.
Pelton said the next steps would involve many administrative conversations about the costs of each proposal.
Residential Hall Occupancy
Both Beatty and Turco said residence hall occupancy is first on their agenda.
According to the report, the simplest way to solve the housing crunch that has plagued the College in recent years is to build a new residence hall.
A new residence hall would also allow a decompression of current housing which would reduce current room occupancy.
Four housing models are developed in the report. The proposals include a 125-bed model that allows for room decompression in existing residence halls; a 125-bed model without the room decompression; a 160-bed model without room decompression; and a 225-bed model that includes new beds and decompression in existing residence halls.
Projected costs for the models range from $7.5 to $13.5 million.
The different models would result in two new, three-story residence halls connected by a commons area. The buildings' first floors would facilitate storage, laundry rooms and small recreational areas.
The commons building would house offices for residence hall and Dean of the College staffs, various meeting rooms, a kitchen/grill and a guest apartment. Two-room doubles would be offered to first-year students and numerous singles would be offered to upperclass students, according to the report.
Beatty emphasized that the implementation of these recommendations is "not going to happen overnight."
"I don't want people to panic about them," he said. "It is probably a two to three year process to get a new cluster built."
Pelton said, "Any new beds will cost some money so we need to have a lot of conversations among the senior administrative staff regarding the report."
Quality of Life
Mandatory on-campus housing for sophomores and the implementation of the Dartmouth Experience Program, which is based on the recommendations of the Committee on the First-Year Experience, are among the report's recommendations to improve the quality of student life.
"The first factor [in considering whether or not a new residential facility should be built] is the sophomore class. There is still a large enough segment of the class residing off-campus, approximately 10 percent in the Fall term, to affect the College's ability to maintain strong occupancy levels in its residence halls in Winter and Spring terms," according to the report.
But the report states that the problem of unused beds in the winter and spring can be virtually eliminated by requiring sophomores to reside on-campus.
In an ORL survey of the Class of 1998, 96 percent of the students responding said "they would reside on campus if housing were guaranteed," according to the report. Fifty-six percent of the students questioned responded to the survey.
"There may be some sophomores who feel that the proposal is a disadvantage to them," Pelton said. "My conversations have helped me to reach the conclusion that students overwhelmingly desire to live on campus, especially if there are student rooms that are desirable."
The Dartmouth Experience was a major impetus behind the proposal.
The report of the Committee on the First-Year Experience advocated the creation of a cluster with enhanced facilities, expanded programming, and space for a faculty advisor.
The Dartmouth Experience seeks to achieve many objectives, according to the report. These include enriching student-faculty and student-student interactions and broadening student social norms by increasing intellectual interaction outside the classroom.
The program is intended to help "integrate a student's academic and residential experience," Beatty said.
"We're talking about a more comprehensive education," he explained. "A lot of learning occurs outside of the classroom and can occur in a place of residence."
Coed, Fraternity, Sorority Housing
The report suggests that the 331 beds that exist in the privately owned coed and fraternity houses should not be included in a count of the College's on-campus housing accommodations, as they are currently.
According to the report, too many of these beds are voluntarily not being filled by affiliated students, while they remain unavailable to non-affiliated students, furthering the housing shortages.
If a new residential facility is built, the report recommends that sophomores not be allowed to live in CFS housing until the summer of their sophomore year.
Turco highlighted the low membership of some houses as part of the problem.
"Some houses have low membership, so there are many empty beds," Turco said. "There's a shortfall."
"There are some houses where students don't want to live in the beds," Turco said. "They can't even get their own members to live there. That's a problem they need to solve. The unaffiliated students are pretty upset about this."
Off-Campus Housing
The report recommends that the College make a significant effort to reduce the number of students residing off-campus.
"Dartmouth College should make every effort to reduce the size of its off-campus undergraduate population by at least one-third. No more than 10 percent of the undergraduate student population should reside off-campus in any given term," according to the report.
There has been a 57 percent increase in the fall off-campus population since 1989, according to the report.
Approximately 15 percent of the enrolled undergraduate population currently lives off-campus.
Turco said she did not want a lack of on-campus housing to deter potential applicants from applying to the College.
"I don't want students in the competitive application process to think that we don't offer a residential college experience," she said.
