Sophomores planning to study abroad fall semester next academic year have just submitted their applications last week. Housing selection is just weeks away. This means that the Office of Residential Living will enact the new housing timeline it decided to delay for a year last February.
The new policy will not allow students accepted to study abroad in the fall to enter the housing lottery. Instead, they will be contacted during their time abroad to select their spring semester housing. Furthermore, students hoping to switch housing in the middle of the semester must now specify a vacancy that they can switch into during the spring. This means that students can no longer request a spot in any available space.
These policies make it very difficult for fall study abroad students to ensure that they can live with their friends come spring, much less in an on-campus apartment that is informally considered, among students, a widely perceived right for juniors. When students can still “hold” places for others through informal agreements that the university did not recognize, the new policy is much more restricting. Unless fall study abroad students can find spring study abroad students to switch places with or juniors who can “hold” the apartment with sophomores, they likely will not be able to find a specific apartment to switch into.
This year, as juniors are now guaranteed housing, the current policy is a slight improvement from the one the Office of Residential Living tried to push last year. However, it still leaves students confused and worried about their spring housing situation. With this new timeline, students who study abroad in the fall will still be unsure of where they will live and who they will live with in the spring. Studying abroad during the semester is an opportunity that the university heavily advertises to current and prospective students, but the university’s housing policy complicates many students’ decisions and, for some, has discouraged them from pursuing the chance to study abroad.
The 2010 Campus Plan legally requires the university to house 385 more students on campus, but it does not demand that students select housing after receiving study abroad decisions. ResLife’s new policy therefore places an unnecessary burden on fall study abroad students.
While administrators have articulated that it does not plan to change this new housing policy, a few weeks remain before the new policy will affect this year’s housing decision. If the Office of Residential Living caved into student input when it attempted to put off the policy last year, then it should do so again this year and allow fall study abroad students to enter the housing lottery.
