'Fend for survival': Students reflect on past housing application cycles

This past year saw various changes to the Carolina Housing application process, including a higher number of underclassman-allocated residence halls and a longer waitlist. Students reflected on recent housing application cycles as Carolina Housing plans to accommodate an increasing waitlist. 

In the 2025-26 housing application cycle, there were approximately 1,300 students on the waitlist, compared to 1,100 in 2024-25 and 600 in the previous cycle. 

“We were registering ahead of a lot of people in our year. They still filled up so fast,” sophomore Elizabeth Coats said. 

Coats said an increase in renovations and allocation of specific dorms to underclassmen caused anxiety among upperclassmen and conflict amongst roommate groups. She also said that transfer students are faced with the near impossibility of securing on-campus housing so early in the year. 

Coats, who is currently living in Grimes Residence Hall, said she went through around ten other dorm options before landing her 11th and final choice.

Some students are calling for the addition of new residence halls to accommodate demand. 

“I feel like they definitely need more dorms, because I know this freshman class is bigger than my class, and then the next class is even bigger than that one,” sophomore Amelia Schmidt said. 

Allan Blattner, executive director of Carolina Housing, wrote in an email statement to The Daily Tar Heel that the changes made to this year’s returning students’ housing selection process — including increased cancellation penalties and earlier cancellation deadlines — were a part of the process to anticipate demand trends. 

“We are in the early stages of a comprehensive housing master plan that will include renovations,” Blattner said.

The plan is also set to include the construction of new residence halls.

However, Blattner said that throughout the expansion process, the number of beds available could fluctuate as buildings are renovated.

Carolina Housing will always hold enough spaces to accommodate the anticipated number of incoming first-years, he said. However, this means that as the number of new students increases, the number of returning students UNC can house is impacted. 

“It feels like they're over-admitting and then pushing that responsibility to find housing and to find a new situation off onto the students, when really it's the administration's issue to solve,” Coats said. 

In the 2024-25 housing cycle, Schmidt said she started with a roommate group of six set to register in an early priority wave. Despite this, they were unable to secure on-campus housing. After a long period on the waitlist, Schmidt said her group received an email around spring break saying they weren’t guaranteed a room.

All six of them had to scramble in different directions to find an expensive, inconvenient, off-campus backup, Schmidt said, and it was frustrating for everyone involved. 

“Especially when they require it for freshmen, and then can't guarantee it for sophomores, but can for seniors,” Schmidt said, referring to seniors getting top priority in her application cycle.

She said the University should pursue an approach that prioritizes students from youngest to oldest, with first-years getting the first pick and seniors being the last. 

After filling out a priority registration form last application cycle and logging into her registration appointment a month later, sophomore Mary Stone said there were no spots left for her and her roommates. She resigned herself to spending months on the waitlist, only to come up with nothing by the end of the school year.

“It was honestly just a fend for survival,” Stone, who decided to leave the list, said. 

Stone said she talked to multiple first-years who had the same experience this cycle, turning to her for advice on what to do. 

“What if somebody can't afford the apartments or the houses around the Chapel Hill campus and their only choice is to stay on campus and to have UNC enroll more students than they can actually house?” Stone asked. 

Stone said that moving forward, she wants to see the University acknowledge the problem in a transparent way and work toward trying to fix it. 

“Just take our experiences into consideration,” Coats said.

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