Most students discovered changes to the Housing Selection Handbook last Monday after a few students made a Facebook event in protest, not when the Office of Residential Living changed the procedure in mid-January. The change does not allow students studying abroad in the fall to enter the housing lottery with their original group, since housing selection now occurs after students have been accepted to the programs. Following student concerns, GUSA passed a resolution Sunday asking the university to delay or reverse the change. Student housing said it is considering the delay.
While these changes may not be as disastrous as the Facebook event described—it wouldn’t force the fall study abroad applicants to find off-campus housing for only spring semester—they do severely complicate matters for students attempting to organize housing selection groups, as the changes were made late into the school year. Beforehand, students received an apartment, dropped out to bring another student in as a “spot filler,” then reversed that change in the spring. These switches were entirely student-facilitated, and Housing would not have enforced any of these agreements. Now, students studying abroad are no longer part of housing selection, instead, their replacements, often underclassmen, are in the housing group from the start.
Patrick Killilee, executive director of student housing, views these changes as minor, and on paper they would seem to be a simple change in timing. But for students scrambling to find housing replacements before they even have housing, the process is unclear and hectic. In the housing selection information session on Tuesday, Killilee admitted that students who planned to use rising sophomores to placehold in the fall are, in fact, punished by the process, because the group will likely receive less desirable lottery numbers because their total housing selection points are lower.
While Housing had the intention of making the process simpler, it only complicated matters by surprising students months after they chose their original groups. Furthermore, that Housing did not notify students is concerning, since this decision is a major procedural change. Killilee said that Housing does not normally notify students of changes this small, as they were planning to release these changes as part of a larger program coming in the following weeks. While this reasoning would have been acceptable before the housing process began, students are now only weeks away from applying for study abroad and housing.
Students are worried about their housing prospects in the spring and are forced to scramble to rearrange housing groups under a process they do not understand. Housing, therefore, should at the very least follow GUSA’s suggestions to delay the change until students understand and approve of the new procedure.
