Do you ever wonder if Dartmouth is the only college facing a housing crunch every year?
While some schools do not have a housing problem at all, Dartmouth, along with some other comparable schools, is making plans to increase residential space over the next few years to accommodate not only current students but additional students as well.
In the meantime, these colleges have to come up with alternative solutions for their respective housing crunches.
Currently, Dartmouth only guarantees housing to first-year and exchange students. Since recent incoming classes have been larger than expected, more upper-class beds have been needed for first-year students.
Middlebury College has taken a unique approach to solve the housing crunch problem.
In addition to transforming dorm lounges into student rooms, Middlebury has temporarily brought in five modular housing units in order to provide an additional 37 beds. Many students request this housing because the units are spacious.
According to Tim Spears, assistant provost, students like living in the prefabricated modular housing. Seniors are often the ones to live in the temporary housing because housing is chosen by seniority.
Since the modular housing is only temporary, Middlebury has "a fair amount of building in mind," Spears said. Additional building is integral if the school plans to continue to guarantee housing for all four years.
At the same time, Middlebury hopes to increase enrollment by 150 students in the next few years. Therefore, they are in the process of building new dorms, one of which should be done by the fall of 2002.
Moreover, Spears insists, housing students "is not a science, it's more an art." "It's crude to go strictly by the numbers, and it is necessary to work with students because it is a human problem," Spears continued.
Manager of the Housing and Dining Co-op Office, Patrick Savolskis at Cornell University agrees that it is hard to go strictly by the numbers.
At Cornell, "We're basically totally full," Savolskis told The Dartmouth. Overcrowding "makes students mad, and it makes parents mad, and rightfully so," Savolskis said.
Freshmen enrollment has been about one hundred above the targeted number this past year, and consequentially some freshmen have been put in temporary housing.
Temporary housing usually means converting lounges into dorm rooms as well as making some doubles into triples.
The Cornell Admissions office is working on better ways to predict the class size, Savolskis said. The school recently hired consultants to try to more accurately calculate the class yield, which he said is the first step to being more prepared to house students.
Cornell currently only guarantees housing for new freshmen, but next year the guarantee will be extended to rising sophomores. Two new residential houses are being constructed. According to Savolskis, Cornell hopes to have a surplus of about 20 beds in future years.
More than 50 percent of upper-class students at Cornell choose to live outside of the dorms. About 25 percent choose Greek housing, while another 30 percent opt to live off campus.
Cornell helps students who choose to live off campus to be more knowledgeable about their choice and to learn how to live on their own. The off-campus housing office provides a list of options as well as information sessions about lease contracts and creating a budget.
Savolskis noted that "People most often underestimate food costs and utilities" when they choose to live off campus. Students learn to live on their own without dorm staff cleaning up after them and fixing problems.
According to the Stanford Daily, this year is facing "the biggest housing crunch in the past five to ten years," said Housing Assignment Services Manager Todd Benson.
In an attempt to solve the predicament, the Stanford Daily reported that the school created sixty-two new living spaces over Christmas break from former dorm study rooms, computer clusters, and games rooms.
The Stanford Daily also stated that some students have been moved off of the main campus into a "luxury apartment complex." Students living in these apartments are so far removed from campus that it is necessary for them to drive or take a shuttle to the main campus.
Yale University told The Dartmouth that they have faced occasional fluctuations in demand for campus housing, but "have never denied someone [housing] that has wanted it," said John Meeske, Dean of Administrative Affairs.
Yale has the benefit of flexible suite housing. Each suite has two bedrooms and a living room. Freshmen and sophomores, who are required to live on campus, usually have four people in each suite. Juniors and seniors will usually have two or three depending on how tight housing is that year.
One reason Yale is not experiencing housing problems is because, although enrollment is up from the past couple years, it is still below the enrollment seen about fifteen years ago.
Meeske said that there is talk about building some new dorms, but it is only speculative. There has been a minimal effort to reduce class size in order to eliminate the possibility of a future housing crunch.
Similarly, Harvard and Princeton have not encountered housing problems.
Both schools operate under a house system in which students are assigned to a particular house for four years.
Mac Broderick, housing dean at Harvard, said that although some houses are more crowded than others, there is enough swing space to house everyone who submits the proper paperwork on time.
At Dartmouth, upperclassmen without housing after the housing lottery are either put on a waiting list or encouraged to find off campus housing.
Lynn Rosenblum, director of housing services, said that usually there are about 200 students who decide to change their D-Plan over the summer, which oftentimes will open up enough beds for students on the waiting list.
For students who are unable to find campus housing, housing services refers them to the rental housing office, which is intended for faculty and staff.
Also, some coed organization houses are able to take in junior and senior boarders, which does not solve the problem for frustrated sophomores.
As a result of the housing crunch on campus, the College is in the process of hiring architects to construct additional dorms. "In about three years we'll be able to open an additional six hundred beds," Rosenblum said.
