The Crisis of Affordable Housing is Hitting College Students at the Dorm Level

As a crisis of affordable housing in the U.S. persists, the number of young college attendees has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. This double-whammy is forcing some schools to adopt unusual – and in some cases, controversial –approaches to addressing limited dorm space on campus.

The scramble for space has left some students wrestling with new questions about what they hope to get out of their college experience.

Housing Emails Sent out to Parents

Two weeks ago, Anne Williams was angrily poring over an email from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette that said her son would have to spend his freshman year living at a hotel. Within days, she yanked him from the school and paid full tuition elsewhere. 

The university, in her view, had suddenly demanded “this big price difference with less than a week to pay for it,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense.” The school ultimately offered to cover the additional expense of living at the hotel, but by then Williams and her son were touring a new campus. 

Their situation is a striking example of the tough choices some families have had to make as students head back to college this fall. As a broader crisis of affordable housing in the U.S. persists, the number of young college attendees has reboundedto pre-pandemic levels. Many universities require first-year students to live on campus, and last spring, freshmen enrollment increased faster than overall undergraduate enrollment, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Some schools are tackling the campus housing crunch in unconventional ways. Louisiana State University offered incoming freshmen whose families live nearby a $3,000 incentive to commute from home rather than stay in the dorms, a university official told a local TV station in July. 

Meanwhile, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign offered a similar deal: $2,000 to students’ accounts, plus 100 meal tickets, for those who canceled their housing contracts. The school also said it would temporarily bunk some resident advisers with roommates. (RAs are on-site resources for residents and typically enjoy the perk of not having roommates.) The change left some students miffed, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Similar dynamics have left some students at other campuses wrestling with new questions about what they hope to get out of their college experience. In recent years, housing insecurity has only gotten worse for low-income students, according to Mark Huelsman, the director of policy and advocacy at Temple University’s Hope Center, which works to combat student homelessness in higher education. 

“This is a problem that the country hasn’t been able to put its arms around, on a policy level and a campus level, for quite some time,” he said. 

Enrollments create ‘bottleneck’

With enrollments on the rise, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has known since last year it might be facing a housing problem this fall. DeWayne Bowie, the school’s vice president of enrollment management, said in an interview that the campus’ freshman class grew by roughly a third over the past five years. He attributed that expansion to marketing improvements and a new prestigious label.

Like many universities, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette requires first-year students to reside on campus (as housing space warrants). The increase in freshmen, coupled with a larger number of older students choosing to stay in the dorms, put a strain on the school’s resources. 

“That has created a bottleneck for us,” he said. 

The school reached out to the owners of nearby apartment complexes in hopes of referring overflow students to them once campus dorms filled up. After the housing waitlist stretched past 500 students this summer, administrators upped their ante. They approached local hotels about drawing up lease agreements, which the school had done in the past when new dorms were under construction. 

The university eventually signed contracts with two hotels, Bowie said, and cleared the housing waitlist. But unless students were recipients of certain scholarships or grants, they would be expected to pay roughly $1,000 more in housing fees than people living on campus, he said. 

It wasn’t what Anne Williams and her 18-year-old son, Ethan, signed up for – and the change ultimately deterred Ethan from attending altogether. Anne wasted no time scheduling a visit to Nicholls State University, a public institution her older son already attends and her alma mater. Ethan liked the campus and living directly on it was important to him, he told her. The price tag was roughly the same. He enrolled right away and started classes Monday. 

“We had to really scramble,” his dad said. 

Other colleges banking on hotel space

The Louisiana campus isn’t the only institution leaning on hotels to fulfill its housing commitments this fall.

New College of Florida, a public school that has drawn considerable outside scrutiny for political reasons, renewed a roughly $4 million contract with a local hotel this year amid a housing deficit. And on the West Coast, San Jose State University recently announced plans to fully purchase a luxury hotel for $165 million to help cover its needs.