Hotel suite or dorm room? Unpacking the college campus housing crunch
From sleeping in hotels to living at home, college students this fall are grappling with disparate, sometimes controversial approaches to addressing limited dorm space on campus.
Two weeks ago, Anne Williams was angrily poring over an email from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette that said her son would have to spend his freshman year living at a hotel. Within days, she yanked him from the school and paid full tuition elsewhere.
The university, in her view, had suddenly demanded “this big price difference with less than a week to pay for it,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense.” The school ultimately offered to cover the additional expense of living at the hotel, but by then Williams and her son were touring a new campus.
Their situation is a striking example of the tough choices some families have had to make as students head back to college this fall. As a broader crisis of affordable housing in the U.S. persists, the number of young college attendees has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. Many universities require first-year students to live on campus, and last spring, freshmen enrollment increased faster than overall undergraduate enrollment, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Some schools are tackling the campus housing crunch in unconventional ways. Louisiana State University offered incoming freshmen whose families live nearby a $3,000 incentive to commute from home rather than stay in the dorms, a university official told a local TV station in July.
Meanwhile, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign offered a similar deal: $2,000 to students’ accounts, plus 100 meal tickets, for those who canceled their housing contracts. The school also said it would temporarily bunk some resident advisers with roommates. (RAs are on-site resources for residents and typically enjoy the perk of not having roommates.) The change left some students miffed, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Chris Axtman-Barker, a spokesperson for the university, said in an email that many factors made it complicated for the administration to predict housing needs. Among them was the major delay this year in the federal college financial aid process. Ultimately, Urbana-Champaign ended up with a greater-than-expected number of students enrolled.
“We apologize for any inconvenience caused by student housing changes,” he said.
Similar dynamics have left some students at other campuses wrestling with new questions about what they hope to get out of their college experience. In recent years, housing insecurity has only gotten worse for low-income students, according to Mark Huelsman, the director of policy and advocacy at Temple University’s Hope Center, which works to combat student homelessness in higher education.
“This is a problem that the country hasn’t been able to put its arms around, on a policy level and a campus level, for quite some time,” he said.
Enrollments create ‘bottleneck’
With enrollments on the rise, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has known since last year it might be facing a housing problem this fall. DeWayne Bowie, the school’s vice president of enrollment management, said in an interview that the campus’ freshman class grew by roughly a third over the past five years. He attributed that expansion to marketing improvements and a new prestigious label.
Like many universities, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette requires first-year students to reside on campus (as housing space warrants). The increase in freshmen, coupled with a larger number of older students choosing to stay in the dorms, put a strain on the school’s resources.
“That has created a bottleneck for us,” he said.
The school reached out to the owners of nearby apartment complexes in hopes of referring overflow students to them once campus dorms filled up. After the housing waitlist stretched past 500 students this summer, administrators upped their ante. They approached local hotels about drawing up lease agreements, which the school had done in the past when new dorms were under construction.
The university eventually signed contracts with two hotels, Bowie said, and cleared the housing waitlist. But unless students were recipients of certain scholarships or grants, they would be expected to pay roughly $1,000 more in housing fees than people living on campus, he said.
It wasn’t what Anne Williams and her 18-year-old son, Ethan, signed up for – and the change ultimately deterred Ethan from attending altogether. Anne wasted no time scheduling a visit to Nicholls State University, a public institution her older son already attends and her alma mater. Ethan liked the campus and living directly on it was important to him, he told her. The price tag was roughly the same. He enrolled right away and started classes Monday.
“We had to really scramble,” his dad said.
Other colleges banking on hotel space
The Louisiana campus isn’t the only institution leaning on hotels to fulfill its housing commitments this fall.
New College of Florida, a public school that has drawn considerable outside scrutiny for political reasons, renewed a roughly $4 million contract with a local hotel this year amid a housing deficit. And on the West Coast, San Jose State University recently announced plans to fully purchase a luxury hotel for $165 million to help cover its needs.
“It’s hard to grow,” Mari Fuentes-Martin, the school’s vice president for student affairs, told Paste BN. “The only way for us to grow is for us to grow into downtown San Jose.”
In January, city officials in Boston greenlit a request from Northeastern University to convert a hotel near Fenway Park into housing for about 900 students. Ella Warner, now a 19-year-old rising sophomore, was placed in that hotel after she returned from studying abroad her freshman fall. She was nervous about it at first and fearful of missing out on the communal aspect of on-campus living. But she said she eventually grew to enjoy the hotel environment.
“It takes a certain personality to kind of make the most out of that,” she said.
The room she shared didn’t have a full kitchen, which was a challenge initially given her vegetarian diet. With lots of soups and salads, she made it work.
Ed Gavaghan, a university spokesperson, said in a statement that Northeastern's satellite campuses in London and California have reduced the pressure on the university to house younger students at the Boston location.
“Demand for a Northeastern education has never been stronger,” he said.
Gavaghan's point echoes the same messaging college officials are pushing 1,600 miles away in Louisiana, where Ethan Williams now shares a campus with his older brother. Though his new school doesn't have the same electrical engineering program that drew him to his first-choice school, his mom is optimistic he's in the right place – at least for now.
"I think he’ll do great," she said.
Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for Paste BN. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.