Ohio University accepted more students for the Fall Semester than they have beds to accommodate them. And now, approximately 215 students who submitted their $200 housing deposit don’t have a place to sleep on-campus.
Ohio University accepted more students for the Fall Semester than they have beds to accommodate them. And now, approximately 215 students who submitted their $200 housing deposit don’t have a place to sleep on-campus.
It’s left OU officials scrambling to shift students around to offer them beds by the time school starts in 17 days. They have come up with two solutions: students might be living in a triple, rather than a double and Residential Assistants will probably have to share their rooms with non-RA students.
It’s possible that the situation might not be as dire as it seems: not every student who submits a housing deposit will attend the university, but officials have long relied on the number who secure housing as a key indicator of how many students to expect in the fall.
Here’s how the numbers look, as of Thursday, according to Peter Trentacoste, executive director of residential housing:
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Residential Housing received 8,361 housing deposits
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4,354 from the new, first-year students
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Residence Halls hold 8,146 students
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215 students don’t have a place to sleep
Rooms considered a “double” are transformed to a “triple”
Some rooms that were initially constructed to hold three people or “a triple,” but have been used in recent years to hold two people, or “a double” will be outfitted back to their intended sizes.
For example, some rooms in Ryors Hall that have three sets of cabinets, but have held just two students for the past few years, could be turned into triples. About 200 rooms will have an extra person living in them.
“We’ve returned many of those back to that capacity,” Trentacoste said.
Residential assistants get a roommate
If there is sufficient space in rooms designated for RAs, which tend to be larger in size, they will likely have a roommate, Trentacoste said.
This would be the first time RAs would have a roommate at OU. RAs receive free housing and a stipend from the university to organize floor and hall events, inform students of hall policies and monitor student behavior.
RAs possibly getting a roommate were emailed earlier this week, but no students have been placed with RAs yet. It would be a temporary fix to this year’s problem and isn’t something OU plans to permanently implement in following years — or throughout the whole 2014-15 academic year, Trentacoste said.
“We can’t say how long it will be at this point, but we do know that our goal is not to have us go all year by any means,” he said.
As school goes on, some freshmen return home within a few days and in Spring Semester, fewer students are living on campus.
Students living with RAs will be the first ones moved to new rooms once they become available. Trentacoste said he doesn’t expect any students to be living with RAs in the spring, when dorm occupancy is 3 to 4 percent lower than the fall.
RAs living with a non-RA will be compensated an additional $75 every week they live together.
“They didn’t sign on for that, so we feel it’s important that they receive something from us in recognition for that happening,” Trentacoste said.
"About 4,000 freshmen"
University officials have repeatedly reiterated that they don’t plan on accommodating larger class sizes with its new dorms, a project that will take about 10 years to complete and cost about $95 million to $105 million.
OU requires most freshmen and sophomores to live on campus.
“We want small incremental growth on the Athens campus,” OU President Roderick McDavis told The Post last year. “We’ll always be right about 4,000 freshmen.”
Enrolling students is a precise science, with many calculations. After students apply, the university accepts a certain percentage, typically thousands more students than actually end up enrolling.
Then, OU tries to estimate how many of those expected freshmen will show up on campus each fall based on a number of factors, including their applications, where they're from and enrollment trends. It's unclear how this year’s number of accepted freshmen compares to previous years.
The calculations are spearheaded by Craig Cornell, vice provost for Enrollment Management, who The Post attempted to interview by coordinating with the university’s media relations office. But the office refused the request and directed all inquires to Trentacoste.
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