Carolina Housing brings changes to on-campus housing application

Carolina Housing announced updates to the housing application process on Wednesday designed to address the increasing demand for on-campus living, however, some students have mixed feelings about the changes. 

“It was kind of a smack in the face,” sophomore Emilie Mutoniwabo said.

In a press release from Carolina Housing, the group announced that going forward, sophomores and juniors will receive random time slots for room selection rather than selection being credit-based.

Additionally, Morrison, Manly and McIver Residence Halls will be sophomore-only for the upcoming academic year and the cancellation fee for terminating a contract will be increased, along with other changes. 

“We hope that this kind of multi-pronged approach will really help [with] getting our waitlist emptied out much quicker, and really just the students who are committing to live on campus are the ones that are applying," Steven Wiley, the director of administrative services for Carolina Housing, said. 

Wiley said that many of the changes made to the application cycle, specifically the increases in cancellation fees, were meant to combat students from “shopping,” or using on-campus housing as a backup if their off-campus housing plans fell through. Wiley said that phenomena was a contributing factor to the “inflated demand” of residing on-campus. 

Wiley said that students previously had until March to cancel their on-campus housing for a $300 penalty. The first cancellation fee is now $500 due in December.

“By tightening up that window, we will hopefully know those cancellations in early spring so that we can get students off the waitlist so we're not keeping them on so long,” he said. 

Wiley said that in order to account for the demand of rising sophomores planning to live on campus, Carolina Housing had to play a “numbers game” as they allocated the amount of people buildings can sustain. 

Due to the low number of seniors living on campus and smaller number of housing cancellations made by them, Wiley said Carolina Housing chose to protect senior priority registration. The choice to randomize registration for sophomores and juniors stemmed from the fact that those are the demographics doing the most “shopping.” 

Mutoniwabo said that getting rid of the credit-based registration system means that they had to decide to renew their sophomore year dorm because of how difficult it would be to accommodate their suites’ needs elsewhere.

“We wanted to play it safe and at least have a dorm for next year,” Mutoniwabo said.

Still, they think it could be better than the risk of randomly drawing one of the last registration spots, and ending up somewhere worse. 

“For people like us who want to stay on campus, it's become a huge stressor,” they said. “Not just because of the fact of competing for housing, just the fact that there is potential now, that as juniors, we could just not have a place to stay on campus." 

Mutoniwabo also said it's somewhat unfair monetarily for juniors who have taken more classes, and therefore paid more in tuition than the years below them, to not have preference over sophomores.

“We've paid more in credits, yet we're competing for the same number of spots,” they said. 

Morgan Sentas, a sophomore who plans to be a Resident Advisor next year, said she doesn’t feel the need to get too stressed about the changes because she understands why Carolina Housing would prioritize certain years, especially when those students are the main groups living on campus.

“I think it's one solution to a really complex problem,” Sentas said.

Carolina Housing is hosting two virtual information sessions on Oct. 15 and Oct. 16 aimed to help people with questions about the application changes.

@mariaesullivan

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