College Students Cram Into Dorms as Schools Scramble
No room left in its bulging dormitories, USC has set up 96 freshmen across the street in the Radisson Hotel where they luxuriate on double beds and enjoy cable TV, a Jacuzzi, maid service and all the comforts of hotel living except:
“No mini-bars,” says freshman Marcy Brooks, finally coming up with something to knock her plush digs. “It really detracts from the college experience.”
Not all freshmen, of course, have fared so well in this fall’s housing crunch as colleges across the country scramble to accommodate a bumper crop of freshmen.
Just across town at UCLA, half of the freshmen moving into the dorms over the weekend discovered they were shoehorned into “triples,” rooms built for two that now have three beds, three wardrobes and three desks.
“It’s awfully tight,” said Jenna Allen, warily entering her room to drop the first armload of clothes. “I think I’m going to be sending a lot of stuff home.”
The situation is similar, though somewhat less intense, in Orange County.
Name-brand schools across the nation have fallen victim to their own success: Their popularity has delivered more freshmen than they are prepared to handle.
Compounding the problem is the growing number of sophomores and upperclassmen who prefer the comfort and convenience of the dorms to striking out on their own.
The squeeze is expected to worsen over the next decade as the children of the baby boomers continue to come of college age.
Just this month, the Department of Education projected that college enrollment will reach an all-time high of 14.6 million this fall--about 240,000 more students than a year ago.
Prestigious schools, to be sure, can attempt to control their numbers by simply turning away more applicants.
But filling a freshmen class is tricky business, much like booking seats on a commercial airline. Admission directors usually double-book or triple-book each seat because students get to choose from a fistful of acceptance letters.
More Students Accepted Offers
What happened this year took some officials by surprise: More students with admission tickets decided to show up this fall than was anticipated.
And for a large university like UCLA, which sent out 10,700 offers for 3,850 slots, just a slight jump in the percentage of accepted offers translated into 350 extra freshmen.
Similarly, UC San Diego was 300 over its target, UC Berkeley by 115. Texas A&M; in College Station was up by a whopping 1,122, University of North Carolina at Charlotte by 700, Oregon State by 670, Rutgers by 500 and USC by 230.
After wooing so many new students, college officials are scrambling to find them parking spaces, classrooms, instructors and, of course, dorm rooms.
USC absorbed some of the increase by installing a fifth student in 24 of the campus’ two-bedroom apartments that in previous years had four occupants.
But USC housing director Jeff Urdahl said the school decided to “take a big financial hit” by subsidizing freshmen through two semesters in the Radisson rather than risk the backlash from students--and parents--if they turned tiny dorm rooms into triples. He expects the subsidy to reach $300,000.
A few freshmen in the Radisson said they wish they could live on campus, closer to the hub of activity. They carp about the hotel rule against hanging posters on the walls or needing to cross Figueroa Street to have their meals in the cafeteria.
But most know they are living the high life--by college standards. And they love it.
“Once we cross that road, this is a different world,” said freshman Philippe Kassouf, kicking back in the spa with two dorm mates. “For what we’re paying, this is what we expected.”
Contributing to the overcrowding, more sophomores and upperclassmen this year decided to return to the dorms.
Some are drawn by computer hookups that provide Internet access 100 times faster than a modem over a telephone line. The standard has become a “port-per-pillow,” meaning that all dorm residents can be online at the same time, doing research, or more often, swapping e-mail or playing computer games.
Dorm rooms are also getting nicer. Instead of constructing high-rise buildings with long corridors and group bathrooms, new ones are often apartment-style dwellings, with a bathroom for every two suites.
“These are not your fathers’ dormitories,” said Gary Schwarzmueller, executive director of the Assn. of College and University Housing Officers.
Then there’s the trend of universities taking up the “residential college” model, where dorms become a focal point of student and intellectual life, complete with live-in faculty members, special lectures and entertainment.
And some schools, like the University of Maryland in College Park, have found that “substance-free” dorms are exceedingly popular among students who want to live in a sanctuary free of smoking, drinking and drugs.
“Our return rate has been going up for the last five years,” said Pat Mielke, Maryland’s director of college life. Sixty-five percent of last year’s dorm residents decided to return this fall, including 92% of those in the substance-free dorms.
So when the university’s freshmen class jumped unexpectedly, Mielke had to turn to hotel rooms to handle 170 students and turn 250 rooms for two into triples.
The housing crunch at UC Irvine is perhaps most dire in Orange County; 500 students remain on waiting lists for housing.
“We’re building 500 new residence hall spaces over the next four years to accommodate a larger entering freshman class,” said Jim Craig, assistant vice chancellor and director of housing.
The new UC Irvine dorm is scheduled to open by the fall of 2002. “We’re building dorms as fast as we can get approval,” UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone said.
The dorms are generally cheaper than housing in the area, but another reason for the lure of dormitory housing is a built-in Internet connection in the dorms; 40% of UCI’s housing now has the high-tech ports.
Craig said that freshmen will continue to be guaranteed a space, but returning students might have to seek off-campus apartments.
Some students have been tripled up in rooms, but mostly voluntarily, Craig said. Tripling reduces the yearly room-and-board bill from $6,000 a year to $5,300.
Some school administrators won’t allow tripling, saying that the emotional price tag for students is too high.
“Even though some students are still on the waiting list, we don’t house students beyond the designed capacity,” said Darlene Stevenson, director of housing and residence life at Cal State Fullerton. There were about 150 students this year who didn’t snag a bed in university housing.
Every student was accommodated at Concordia University in Irvine, where about 600 students were housed on campus. Robert Barnes, vice president of administration, said the need for new dorms is likely to arise, but the college will never consider tripling.
“We’ve tried tripling here and we decided it was far too costly in terms of student morale,” he said.
Chapman University in Orange uses a lottery system to fill the 860 residence spaces. They had to triple about 30 students, according to Deann Yocum-Gaffney, director of housing and residence life. “We weren’t able to place people immediately,” she said. “But you’d rather have this problem than not enough students in the halls.”
The University of Minnesota also took over a motel near campus to handle its overflow from the biggest freshmen class in a dozen years. Students there promptly re-christened The Days Inn as the “Happy Days Inn.”
High Rent Makes Dorms Appealing
Dorm crowding is often exacerbated by surrounding rental markets, especially in California where many popular schools are in coastal resort towns--Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, La Jolla--or in fashionable high-rent districts like Westwood or Palo Alto.
Stanford houses 96% of its undergraduates and 50% of its graduate students on campus, but those who traditionally lived elsewhere came knocking this fall.
“The Silicon Valley boom has escalated rents to what may be the highest in the state--something a graduate student can’t afford on a stipend,” said Stanford housing director Rodger Whitney.
So Stanford loaded up one-bedroom apartments with two students, turned single dorm rooms into doubles, and agreed to subsidize the rent of 250 students in off-campus apartments in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Redwood City.
UC Santa Cruz has lined up 200 motel rooms for students during the resort town’s low season--the fall and winter quarters. Students promise to be out by spring quarter, when the motels begin to fill with tourists flocking to the beach.
University officials also begged neighbors to open their homes to students. “You might just find yourself renting to a future astronaut,” reads one newspaper ad. It features a picture of Santa Cruz alum Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space.
“Some see this as an act of desperation,” said UC Santa Cruz Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood. “We see is as good for community relations.”
Off-campus housing in Berkeley has always been tight, but campus officials suspect landlords are keeping rentals off the market until Jan. 1, when a new state law will allow them to hike rents in unoccupied units.
“It’s so bad,” said sophomore Jimmy Chao. “I have a friend who spent $40 a day in a motel until he finally found a place in Emeryville. Now he commutes from there.”
Others are commuting from as far away as Sacramento, San Jose and San Mateo, said Berkeley administrative services director Sondra Jensen. Dorms remain packed, she said, with 16 study lounges converted into bedrooms, and 43 rooms for two turned into triples.
Not all colleges are oversubscribed. Some lesser-known private schools must scramble to fill beds and classrooms.
The University of Judaism in Bel-Air has some space, so it has filled the vacancy with spillover freshmen from UCLA. About 15 UCLA students opted for these dorms in the hills, about five miles from the Westwood campus.
Others took up residence over the weekend on the Westwood campus. A record 53% of UCLA freshmen crammed into triples, many in the old-style high-rise dorms that resemble concrete boxes stacked one upon another.
The unpacking continued through Sunday, parents wrestling with computer boxes, roommates bumping into each other.
“Where do I put the food?” asked freshman Mai Ngo, holding a bag of snacks. She settled on a desk drawer. “I can’t believe there are this many people in such a tiny room.”
In the high-rise next door, freshman Miroslava Rebenczuk didn’t have a permanent room--yet. She set up camp in a study lounge that has become a makeshift bedroom for six women. Dorm officials hope to move them into regular rooms as vacancies arise.
“It’s not so bad,” Rebenczuk said, surveying the lounge. “It’ll all depend on who are my roommates.”
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Times staff writer Elaine Gale also contributed to this story.
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Baby Boomlet
Colleges and universities fear they will be swamped by a wave of students as the children of baby boomers come of age. Below are past and projected enrollments for the University of California and Cal State systems.
