On Sept. 17, Residential Life sent out an email notifying on-campus students that housing sign-ups for the 2015-2016 academic year start at the end of October. The email is alarming for what it doesn’t include: an explanation. Seemingly out of nowhere, ResLife made a decision with far-reaching social and financial implications, and all without student input. Changing the deadline for housing from spring to fall semester means that students have only a little more than a month to organize their living situations for next year. That is simply not enough.
With freshman year comes a crushing pressure to make friends, and fast. The mere thought of sitting alone during dinner sends most freshmen into fits of social anxiety. Imagine trying to find a group of ideal suitemates when you still haven’t even learned the difference between the Old and New Unions. Despite the high volume of Halloween group shots uploaded to social media, most students simply do not know who their real friends are by the end of October. We join clubs and Greek Life second semester, and we begin to take classes that interest us. The people we meet here are the ones with whom we choose to live.
Forcing students to register by such an early date consigns many to an extra year of separation from the friends with whom they’re closest, and possibly even into an uncomfortable situation. That ResLife did not even consider such implications demonstrates that it perceives students as names in a database rather than as individuals with emotional needs.
Sure, you can always switch housing if you make new friends and somehow navigate the half-baked online process. But it creates an uncomfortable situation when February rolls around and students are forced to tell the person they committed to dorm with in October that they have changed their minds.
ResLife tries to sugarcoat this change by saying that the $200 registration fee has been eliminated. What they don’t advertise, however, is that the previously free cancellation now costs $200 before the March 10 deadline. After March 10, unless you transfer, leave the country or have a medical condition that will keep you from attending school, you owe the entire upcoming year’s room and board. Last year, you could leave your housing agreement before June 16 without any strings attached.
For students considering rooming with friends who are still figuring out whether or not they’ll transfer or study abroad next year, their potential living situations are now poison. If they do transfer or study abroad, the student staying on campus will be stuck without any backup options because the new system of deadlines makes changing room arrangements inflexible.
We’ve been led to believe that this change is to alleviate students’ stress about selecting housing. Don’t buy it. This decision was made out of monetary concerns for the University. If this was really about students, we should have been consulted. Not even the Student Association, the very people we elected to represent us and our interests to the administration, was given more than a few weeks notice. Anyone on campus could have told the University that this was a terrible idea.
Instead of reducing stress, the University is adding to it. We used to be able to shop around for leases in the fall, knowing that if nothing turned up, we could always sign up for on-campus housing in the spring. Now, if you and your friends can’t find a suitable place off campus, you risk missing crucial deadlines for on-campus signups. Rather than looking out for the welfare of the students, the University has decided to compete with the businesses looking to exploit them.
A policy change like this is unacceptable. And while it may be too late for this year’s freshmen, ResLife needs to take a step back and reevaluate its priorities.